Drug combination discovered that improves survival in prostate cancer patients

An international trial involving the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) in Barcelona has demonstrated that the combination of talazoparib and enzalutamide leads to a "significant" improvement in survival in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer . This was announced by the VHIO this Friday in a statement, outlining the results of the phase 3 clinical trial called TALAPRO-2, which was conducted in 142 centers in 26 countries and co-authored by the co-leader of the institute's Prostate Cancer Research Group, Dr. Joan Carles.

The study consists of two parts: one evaluates the efficacy of the combination of talazoparib , an oral poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor, and enzalutamide , an androgen receptor inhibitor, in 399 patients with genetic alterations in DNA damage repair pathways.

The results of this phase, just published in The Lancet , show that people treated with the experimental combination had a median overall survival of 45.1 months, compared to 31.1 months in the group treated with enzalutamide and placebo. "This represents a 38% reduction in the risk of death in patients treated" with this combination, the statement highlights.

In the other phase of the trial, the drug combination was tested without selecting patients based on their genomic profile: the results, released in February, showed that the combination increased overall survival by 8.8 months and reduced the risk of death by 20.4%.

Thus, this is the first combination of a PARP inhibitor with an androgen receptor inhibitor to demonstrate "a statistically significant benefit" in people with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who have alterations in homologous recombination repair genes.