Olaparib now approved for treating advanced pancreatic cancer

Treatment with the drug olaparib significantly reduced the risk of disease progression or death from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to findings from an international, phase-III POLO (Pancreas cancer OLaparib Ongoing) trial published in June 2019.

Now that drug, jointly developed and commercialized by AstraZeneca and Merck under the trade name LYNPARZA, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of adult patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer whose disease has not progressed after at least 16 weeks of first line chemotherapy.

Olaparib is a PARP inhibitor. It targets cancer cells that have a defect in DNA damage repair. Progression-free survival, the primary endpoint in the study, was 7.4 months on the olaparib arm, and 3.8 months on the placebo arm. From 6 months onwards, more than twice the proportion of patients on the olaparib arm were progression-free.

“This is clearly a practice changing trial,” said cancer specialist Hedy Kindler, MD, lead author of the study and a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. “It will change how we think about patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and who should consider germline testing.”

The global study — featured at the Plenary Session at ASCO, the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology in Chicago, and published online June 2 in the