Heat Shock Protein 90 Inhibitor in Lung Cancer: GALAXY Clinical Trials
Posted: Tuesday, March 3, 2020
New research from the GALAXY-2 international phase III trial has shown that the addition of ganetespib, a heat shock protein 90 inhibitor, to docetaxel did not result in improved survival as salvage therapy for patients with advanced-stage lung adenocarcinoma. The study, which was conducted by Rathi N. Pillai, MD, of the Emory School of Medicine and colleagues, was “stopped early as a result of futility at planned interim analysis.” The research was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Researchers enrolled 677 patients with stage IIIB or IV adenocarcinoma of the lung that was wild type for EGFR and ALK in the trial. Of those patients, 335 were randomly assigned to ganetespib on days 1 and 15 and to docetaxel on day 1 of a 21-day cycle. A total of 337 patients were assigned to docetaxel alone.
Overall survival was 10.9 months with ganetespib and docetaxel compared with 10.5 months with docetaxel (hazard ratio = 1.11; I = .329). The median progression-free survival was 4.2 months in the ganetespib-and-docetaxel arm compared with 4.3 months in the docetaxel arm (hazard ratio = 1.16; P = .119). The most common grade 3 or 4 adverse event in both arms was neutropenia: 30.9% with the combination therapy versus 25% with docetaxel alone.
“With the advent of mechanism-driven new small-molecule inhibitors in driver mutation–positive adenocarcinomas and the improvement in patient outcomes with immunotherapy in non–oncogene-driven non–small cell lung cancer, it is highly unlikely that heat shock protein 90 inhibition will be studied further in non–small cell lung cancer,” the authors concluded.
Disclosure: The authors’ disclosures can be found at ascopubs.org.
