LONDON — An experimental cancer treatment from Roche failed to improve survival in a major lung cancer study, the company said Tuesday, a result that will further stoke doubts about the drug’s target.
In a short statement, Roche said that a combination of the drug, called tiragolumab, with its existing medicine Tecentriq did not outperform Tecentriq alone on the study’s primary endpoint of overall survival. The Phase 3 study, known as SKYSCRAPER-01, included more than 500 patients with a form of advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
Tiragolumab was designed to target a protein called TIGIT, which in recent years was seen as the next blockbuster opportunity in cancer immunotherapy. Roche and other biopharma companies poured resources into standing up anti-TIGIT programs, thinking they could augment the results of the very successful drugs that go after another protein, PD-1.
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