Chemotherapy biotech NuCana’s stock $NCNA tanked nearly 50% in premarket trading Friday following a Thursday announcement that it had stopped a Phase 2 trial due to disappointing data.
The company said that the study is being discontinued following a pre-planned initial analysis, which found that the combination of NUC-3373 (NuCana’s candidate derived from a chemotherapy agent) with leucovorin, irinotecan and bevacizumab “was unlikely to” hit the primary endpoint of progression-free survival in patients with second-line colorectal cancer.
That’s even considering “prognostic imbalances favoring the control arm,” which consists of 5-fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan and bevacizumab, according to the company.
NuCana was aiming to develop NUC-3373 as a replacement for 5-fluorouracil, a widely-used chemotherapy, Josep Tabernero, the chair of the study committee, wrote in a statement.
Hugh GriffithWhile NUC-3373 is derived from 5-fluorouracil, it’s “a new chemical entity” designed to be safer and easier to administer. According to NuCana, it generates much higher concentrations of active anti-cancer metabolites and has a better safety profile.
“The premise of this ambitious goal was based on robust non-clinical and clinical data and the NuTide:323 study team is very disappointed with this outcome,” Tabernero added.
NuCana CEO Hugh Griffith said the discontinuation of the study doesn’t impact another ongoing trial in which NUC-3373 is combined with either pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in solid tumors, or docetaxel in patients with lung cancer.
Griffith added that the company is “excited about the potential of NUC-7738, a novel agent that profoundly impacts gene expression in cancer cells and targets multiple aspects of the tumor microenvironment.” NUC-7738, one of the company’s two candidates, is in a Phase 2 trial evaluating the candidate as a monotherapy in patients with advanced solid tumors and in combination with pembrolizumab in patients with melanoma.