Boehringer Ingelheim reports positive data from head-to-head Giotrif trial

Boehringer Ingelheim has announced new clinical data demonstrating the benefits offered by its lung cancer drug Giotrif.

Results from the LUX-Lung 7 trial demonstrated superiority in progression-free survival and time to treatment failure with Giotrif compared to an older, more established therapy in the first-line treatment of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer with common EGFR mutations.

It meant the trial met two of its co-primary endpoints, with 27 percent of Giotrif patients being free of cancer growth 18 months after the start of treatment and 18 percent still being cancer-free after 24 months.

Indeed, the progression-free survival difference was shown to become more prominent over time, so that by 24 months the rate of patients who were free of cancer growth was more than double that of the comparator product.

Dr Mehdi Shahidi, medical head for solid tumour oncology at Boehringer Ingelheim, said: "LUX-Lung 7 is the second positive head-to-head trial of afatinib versus first-generation EGFR TKIs in lung cancer, showing that first and second-generation EGFR-targeted agents are not the same."

The drug was first approved in Europe for the treatment of EGFR mutation-positive lung cancer in 2013.