May 18 (Reuters) – Merck said on Monday its experimental drug helped certain patients with uterine cancer live longer and kept their disease from worsening in a late-stage trial.
The company said the drug, sacituzumab tirumotecan, or sac-TMT, showed a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in both overall survival and how long patients lived before their disease worsened, compared with chemotherapy, meeting the trial’s main goals. It did not disclose the magnitude of the benefit.
The trial enrolled 776 patients with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer who had previously been treated with platinum-based chemotherapy and immunotherapy, given either together or separately.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive either sac-TMT or one of two chemotherapy drugs, doxorubicin or paclitaxel.
sac-TMT is an antibody-drug conjugate, a type of targeted therapy that delivers cancer-killing chemotherapy directly to tumor cells by binding to a protein called TROP2.
“There has been growing investor interest in sac-TMT’s potential over the past several months, and we expect today’s positive news to only increase that enthusiasm further,” said Guggenheim analyst Vamil Divan.
Cancer of the uterus lining is one of the few cancers growing in both diagnoses and deaths worldwide.
About 68,000 cases of endometrial cancer are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2026, with roughly 14,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.
RBC Capital Markets analysts estimated risk-unadjusted sales of $7.2 billion in 2034 for the drug, assuming a 2027 launch.
Reuters reported last year that sac-TMT has been selected for the FDA’s Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, with the agency expecting a regulatory filing later this year.
The voucher program is designed to speed up reviews of drugs seen as addressing urgent public health needs, cutting review timelines to one to two months versus the usual 10 to 12 months.
Merck is developing the drug with Chinese biotech firm Kelun-Biotech, which discovered the therapy.
(Reporting by Kamal Choudhury in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo and Devika Syamnath)
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