Loxo '292 And Cancer Drug Development Today: So Much Promise, So Many Questions

Loxo Oncology Inc.'s highly selective RET inhibitor LOXO-292 stood out at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting as one example of where cancer drug development is going – toward cancer treatment based on the molecular underpinnings of disease rather than tissue of origin. But while Loxo presented encouraging data as a tissue agnostic approach for select patients, the importance of tissue of origin can't be ignored. Data presented on a different drug, Roche's PI3K inhibitor taselisib, from a basket trial funded by the National Cancer Institute, disappointed, highlighting the persistent challenges.

The drug industry is increasingly moving the precision medicine goalpost forward, from chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy to next-generation sequencing that can rapidly characterize the genetic mutations marking a...