SMARCB1-deficient renal medullary carcinoma, abbreviated often as RMC, is a rare but very deadly kidney cancer that predominantly afflicts young individuals of African descent, mainly African Americans in the United States. And it is a disease that is in urgent need for novel therapies because the therapies that work against other kidney cancers do not work at all against RMC...
SMARCB1-deficient renal medullary carcinoma, abbreviated often as RMC, is a rare but very deadly kidney cancer that predominantly afflicts young individuals of African descent, mainly African Americans in the United States. And it is a disease that is in urgent need for novel therapies because the therapies that work against other kidney cancers do not work at all against RMC. And so what I will be discussing in my presentation in this year’s ASCO will be the preclinical data and the prospective registry data, clinical data of a therapy that we have developed specifically for patients with RMC, taking advantage of the fact that we discovered that RMC expresses high levels of EGFR, specifically wild-type EGFR, not mutated EGFR. So it’s more like head and neck cancers that express wild-type EGFR as opposed to lung cancers that express mutated EGFR. So it’s more like head and neck cancers that express wild-type EGFR as opposed to lung cancers that express mutated EGFR. And with lung cancers, we use tyrosine kinase inhibitors against the mutated EGFR, whereas with wild-type EGFR, let’s say head and neck cancer, we use monoclonal antibodies. Similarly, our preclinical data suggested that the use of monoclonal antibodies like panitumumab are more effective than tyrosine kinase inhibitors like erlotinib against the EGFR in our RMC models. And indeed, our prospective multinational registry data showed very, very powerful responses, an objective response rate of about 55 percent with a complete response rate of about 15 percent in patients that were heavily pre-treated with a progression-free survival of 5.8 months. Now we have to keep in mind that for this disease the standard of care in the first-line setting, that is standard platinum-based chemotherapy, produces objective responses of less than 30% and a progression-free survival of less than four months with a complete response rate of less than 5%. So to get these results in the heavily pre-treated setting is unprecedented and is essentially changing our standard of care for this disease.
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