Amgen joins alliance to study personalised lung cancer therapies

Amgen has announced that it will be allying with the US National Cancer Institute and a number of other public and private sector partners on new lung cancer research.

The firm will join fellow pharmaceutical companies Genentech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and MedImmune in supporting the the Lung Master Protocol (Lung-MAP), a groundbreaking new clinical trial programme looking at personalised treatment for squamous cell lung cancer.

It will use biomarker-driven research and genomic profiling to match squamous cell lung cancer patients to investigational treatments based on their individual cancer profiles. This will be the first programme to study a large number of rare lung cancer subsets under a single trial protocol.

Approximately 500 to 1,000 patients will be screened each year for more than 200 cancer-related genes. A total of five investigational drugs have been selected for inclusion in the initial trial, including Amgen's rilotumumab.

Dr Sean Harper, executive vice-president of research and development at Amgen, said: "This latest collaboration can significantly speed our understanding of targeted approaches for this complex and underserved form of lung cancer, while demonstrating how genomic testing can drive the evolution of clinical trial design."

Earlier this month, the company attended the European League Against Rheumatism annual congress, where it shared positive phase II trial data for its psoriatic arthritis drug brodalumab.