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AstraZeneca will pay Daiichi Sankyo $1.35 billion up front in a deal that could be worth up to $6.9 billion. Under the agreement, AstraZeneca will work with Daiichi Sankyo to develop and commercialize trastuzumab deruxtecan (DS-8201), Daiichi's HER2-targeting antibody–drug conjugate.

The FDA granted accelerated approval to the pan-FGFR inhibitor erdafitinib (Balversa; Janssen) for patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who have an FGFR3 or FGFR2 mutation and who have not responded to platinum-containing chemotherapy. The approval, the first for a targeted therapy for bladder cancer, was based on the phase II BLC2001 trial, in which 87 patients had an overall response rate of 32.2%.

Mesothelin-targeted CAR T cells may be a promising therapy for solid tumors, according to preliminary data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019 in Atlanta, GA. In a phase I trial of 21 patients with mesothelioma or pleural metastatic lung or breast cancer, the T cells elicited responses in 10 patients, including eight of 11 who received a PD-1 inhibitor following CAR T-cell therapy.

The number of cervical precancers in the United States is declining (MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2019;68:337–43). Between 2008 and 2016, the number of women diagnosed with a cervical intraepithelial neoplasia of grade 2 or worse decreased from 216,000 to 196,000, a drop that is mostly attributable to immunization with the human papillomavirus vaccine.

Expanded germline panel testing may capture more pathogenic risk variants in patients with cancer, according to an analysis from Invitae presented at the 2019 American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA. For 113,107 individuals with a history of breast, ovarian, colorectal, pancreatic, or prostate cancer, researchers compared standard testing with a two- to five- gene panel to an expanded next-generation sequencing panel of 83 cancer-related genes. The expanded panel detected clinically actionable risk variants in an additional 9,739 patients, or 8.6%.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/CDNews.