Kazia Therapeutics is eyeing an FDA accelerated approval pathway for its investigational glioblastoma drug paxalisib, with Wednesday’s release of secondary overall survival data from a Phase II/III trial.
Kazia Therapeutics on Wednesday unveiled additional data from the Phase II/III GBM-AGILE study, picking out secondary efficacy signals as it eyes an FDA accelerated approval pathway for its investigational glioblastoma treatment paxalisib.
GBM-AGILE is a large global study designed to test several investigational glioblastoma treatments versus current standard of care. In the case of paxalisib, the study used chemotherapy with temozolomide for newly diagnosed patients and with lomustine for those with recurrent disease. The primary outcome of interest was overall survival (OS).
Paxalisib showed no signs of efficacy in the recurrent disease setting. Median OS in treated patients was 8.05 months, which was nearly two months shorter than the 9.69-month median OS in comparators treated with lomustine. The Australian biotech is currently conducting deeper analysis of these data “to elucidate potential signs for further consideration.”
Kazia is focused on the subset of patients who were newly diagnosed with glioblastoma. In this population, paxalisib led to a median OS of 14.77 months, slightly longer than that in temozolomide counterparts, who survived for a median of 13.84 months.
The biotech further zoomed in on a smaller slice of control patients who were enrolled into GBM-AGILE concurrently with paxalisib’s inclusion into the study. In this concurrent population, median OS for paxalisib grew to 15.54 months while that for comparators dipped to 11.89 months.
Kazia CEO John Friend pointed to this survival difference, saying that the biotech is “excited to have shown a 3.8-month improvement in overall survival, an approximate 33% improvement, for newly diagnosed unmethylated patients with GBM compared to the concurrent standard-of-care arm.”
“Having comparable [OS] data across two independent studies in a compelling outcome in this difficult to treat population,” Friend noted, adding that the biotech will bring these findings to the FDA to discuss “possible approaches” to an accelerated approval for paxalisib.
The market reacted favorably to Kazia’s readout, with its stocks surging 142% on Wednesday, according to SeekingAlpha.
Initially invented by Genentech, paxalisib works by inhibiting the action of PI3K, a key player in cell growth and division which are highly dysregulated in several cancers. Unlike most other PI3K blockers, paxalisib can cross the blood-brain barrier making it a promising candidate for malignancies of the central nervous system.
In August 2022, Kazia reported that paxalisib failed to reach the pre-defined criteria for moving to the second phase of GBM-AGILE. However, at the time, the biotech was still blinded to the study’s results and could not fully understand the failure.
