Katherine C. Fuh, MD, PhD, on Ovarian Cancer: New Data on Batiraxcept and Paclitaxel

So most ovarian cancers will become treatment resistant, in particular platinum resistant. We identified AXL receptor tyrosine kinase that's actually expressed in these platinum-resistant ovarian cancers. A targeted therapy was developed named batiraxcept or AVB-500, which actually is a fusion protein that targets GAS6's ligand. So instead of the GAS6 ligand binding to the membrane AXL receptor, this batiraxcept will bind to that GAS6 ligand so that receptor on the tumor will never be activated. So a phase three trial that we presented talked about GOG-3059 or ENGOT OV-66, AXLerate-OC. This really was focusing on the question, if we give our patients who have platinum-resistant ovarian cancer weekly paclitaxel, which is the standard of care, compared to weekly paclitaxel with batiraxcept, would they actually improve in terms of progression-free survival as a primary endpoint and overall survival as a secondary? We also did perform exploratory endpoints looking at the expression of our tumors for AXL as well as GAS6 and then other exploratory blood markers like serum [inaudible 00:01:15] and GAS6 ratio. Our findings did show that there was similar progression-free survival between those patients who received the standard of care weekly paclitaxel compared to those with batiraxcept with weekly paclitaxel in both progression-free survival and overall survival, about 5 months for PFS and 14 months for OS. When we actually did the exploratory analysis looking at the AXL-high tumors, we did see a difference for those patients who actually had high AXL in their tumor, which is about 80% intensity. They actually benefited from the receiving batiraxcept and paclitaxel compared to paclitaxel alone. We saw this both in progression-free survival and overall survival. So this really leads us to ask the next questions in terms of, can we actually develop perhaps this biomarker for AXL? Can we actually target this biomarker and use this biomarker targeted therapy in the future by using this batiraxcept or another AXL inhibitor in combination with paclitaxel for our patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer? So in the future, we would like to see if those patients with high-AXL tumors could actually benefit from an AXL inhibitor in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer and really utilize this AXL expression to help focus in on the patients who actually might not benefit from standard of care and may actually benefit from a combination with the AXL inhibitor.