ASCO 2016 | AZD2014 for treating ER+ metastatic breast cancer – mode of action and trial results

Erika Hamilton of Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, TN talks about the Phase I trial of AZD2014 for the treatment of patients with with estrogen receptor (ER+) metastatic breast cancer (BC) (NCT01597388). AZD2014 is a dual mammalian target of rapamycin (mTORC1/2) inhibitor that works in contrast with everolimus, which is the approved agent that acts to only inhibit mTORC1. Since signalling through mTORC2 is a resistance mechanism for everolimus, they are particularly excited to see this activity in combination with fulvestrant for a dual mTOR inhibit, i.e. blocking mTOR complex 1 and 2.
She highlights that the study allowed patients that were fulvestrant naive and also fulvestrant pre-treated patients. She proceeds to highlight that she found the activity shown by the fulvestrant pre-treated patients especially interesting. The 99 patient study, where half of the patients had already seen fulvestrant, saw 50% of the patients had a progression-free survival (PFS) of more than five cycles, and 25% had a PFS of more than ten cycles. Therefore, the study showed that the addition of AZD2014 to fulvestrant, sensitized these tumors to endocrine therapy.
Recorded at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), held in Chicago, IL.