NEW YORK – The Access to Comprehensive Genomic Profiling Coalition, a group working to expand insurance coverage of broad genomic testing panels for advanced cancer patients, this week announced Strata Oncology as its newest member. Like other members in the coalition, Strata offers comprehensive genomic profiling using its StrataNGS panel, and combines patients' genomic information with real-world data to provide information doctors can use to make personalized treatment plans. The company also operates a clinical trial platform.
Ideaya Biosciences this week closed its common stock public offering. The company sold 5,333,333 shares at the public offering price of $17.25 per share. The underwriters also exercised the full option to purchase additional shares at the offering price. The net proceeds from the offering were approximately $86.1 million, after deducting the underwriting discount, commissions, and offering expenses. Ideaya will use the funding to advance development of its pipeline, including its lead candidates, IDE397, a MAT2A inhibitor, and PKC inhibitor darovasertib.
Children's Cancer Institute Australia said this week that The Lott, Australia's official lottery provider, has donated $600,000 AUD ($445,224 USD) to the ZERO Child Cancer Program, an initiative to advance precision oncology in pediatric cancers. The program, which is jointly led by the Children's Cancer Institute and Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children's Hospital with involvement from both Australian and international collaborators, launched a national umbrella clinical trial dubbed PRISM in 2017. In the years since, more than 500 children with high-risk or relapsed cancers have enrolled in the trial, of whom more than 70 percent have received matched treatment recommendations based on their cancers' molecular characteristics.
Bristol Myers Squibb said this week that its Phase III CheckMate-651 trial evaluating the combined checkpoint inhibitors nivolimab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) versus chemotherapy for advanced head and neck cancer patients did not meet its primary endpoints. The randomized trial compared the checkpoint inhibitor combination to a three-drug chemotherapy regimen in the first-line treatment setting, and its primary aims included assessing overall survival benefit among all enrolled patients and among patients whose tumors expressed PD-L1. The trial failed to show a significant benefit with the immunotherapy combination in either of these patient groups, although BMS noted a positive trend toward overall survival benefit specifically in patients whose tumors expressed PD-L1 with a combined positive score of at least 20.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared in Precision Oncology News.