Focusing on Hard to Treat Cancers: An Interview with Astellas' Dr. Steve Benner and Mark Reisenauer

Recorded during the 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), held June 2 - 6, 2017 in Chicago, Ill, Sonia Portillo and Peter Hofland, the team behind The Onco'Zine Brief, interview Dr. Steve Benner – Senior Vice President and Therapeutics Area Head of Oncology at Astellas Pharmaceuticals, and Mark Reisenauer, Senior Vice President, Oncology business unit at Astellas Pharmaceuticals. Astellas currently has several highly targeted drugs in development and clinical trials, one of which is enfortumab vedotin, which is demonstrating promising results for metastatic urothelial cancer patients that fail checkpoint inhibitor therapies or CPIs. Enfortumab vedotin is an investigational antibody-drug conjugate or ADC designed to deliver the cell-killing, microtubule-disrupting, agent called monomethyl auristatin E or MMAE to the target Nectin-4, a cell adhesion molecule identified as an ADC target by Astellas, which is expressed on many solid tumors. The drug uses Seattle Genetics’ proprietary linker technology. During the 2017 ASCO-meeting Astellas also presented data for enzalutamide, a drug that is already approved for metastatic, castration resistant prostate cancer, and which is now being further investigated. Prostate cancer tops the list of cancer diagnosis in men, and it’s the second leading cause of cancer deaths. This group of patients is especially in need of new treatments, since once prostate cancer has metastasized, survival chances drop significantly, going from a five-year survival rate of 99%, to one of just 28%. And lastly, the company presented data for a drug called IMAB362- an agent which showed impressive results in combination with chemotherapy, in a study that was presented at last year’s ASCO.