Four in five tumours shrank: a guided-missile drug pairing is opening a door in ovarian cancer

The standard treatment for platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer — cancer that responds to platinum chemotherapy at first — has barely changed in a decade. Eli Lilly's experimental drug sofetabart mipitecan is an antibody-drug conjugate: an antibody that hunts a marker found on almost all ovarian cancer cells and delivers chemotherapy straight into them. In first Phase 1 results presented at the ESMO congress on October 24, pairing it with bevacizumab shrank tumours in 79% of patients and controlled the disease in every patient treated — including women whose cancers had already resisted a common drug class. Large Phase 3 trials are now under way.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation