AstraZeneca cancer drug fails key clinical trial

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LONDON — AstraZeneca said Friday that a breast cancer pill failed in a pivotal trial testing it as a first-line therapy in advanced tumors, a result that could limit the use of the medicine.

The drug, camizestrant, in combination with another medicine did not outperform standard treatment on a measure of how long patients went before their cancer progressed. The SERENA-4 trial enrolled patients with ER-positive, HER2-negative advanced cancer who hadn’t had another systemic therapy for advanced disease.

Camizestrant earlier this month won accelerated approval in the U.S. as Etcamah as a treatment for patients who develop a mutation in their tumors that’s a sign of emerging drug resistance. The SERENA-4 trial, had it been successful, could have opened up a much larger market for the drug.

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