Add head and neck cancer to ALX's failures

The latest failure of ALX's troubled CD47 inhibitor evorpacept, revealed on Friday in the Aspen-03 and 04 studies, is at least something the company had prepared for by setting up a pivot to a new anti-EGFR ADC, ALX2004. But such a pivot hasn't yet been made, as despite these two head and neck cancer studies drawing a blank ALX insists that it "remains confident in continuing to pursue evorpacept". Aspen-03 and 04 both tested evorpacept in the first-line setting in combination with Keytruda, with or without chemo depending on PD-L1 expression, based on an earlier promising signal in an uncontrolled multi-tumour study, Aspen-01. But ultimately they have drawn a blank, ALX has revealed; the group says Aspen-03 at least showed a promising signal versus historical control (implying 19% ORR in Keytruda's Keynote-048 trial), hinting at outperformance of its control arm, but no such saving grace is offered for Aspen-04, and head and neck cancer is being dropped as an evorpacept indication. Evorpacept's big hope, at least according to ALX, is gastric cancer, where the company continues to tout its registrational potential based on a subgroup analysis of the failed Aspen-06 trial.