Evopoint doesn't follow Pfizer into prostate cancer

The controversial space of EZH2 inhibition recently welcomed one highly prominent pivotal entrant, Pfizer, and it's about to see another. Evopoint Biosciences' EZH2 inhibitor XNW5004 will start its first phase 3 study next month, a new listing on the clinicaltrials.gov registry has revealed. However, this move is rather less contentious than Pfizer's, concerning the somewhat niche setting of peripheral T-cell lymphoma. For its part Pfizer put its EZH2 contender, mevrometostat, on the fast track in the high-profile space of castration-resistant prostate cancer, moving it from phase 1 straight into phase 3, and then started a second pivotal study in the first-line setting. Pfizer's rationale was that EZH2 can be seen in prostate cancer progression, and blocking EZH2 has preclinically been shown to reverse resistance to next-generation hormonal agents, but this has been thrown into doubt clinically by the failures of Novartis's MorphoSys-derived tulmimetostat and CPI-1205, and Ipsen's Tazverik. Evopoint has studied XNW5004 in prostate cancer in phase 2, but it's notable that it hasn't – yet – followed Pfizer by taking the molecule into pivotal development in this setting.

EZH2 inhibitors in phase 3

Source: OncologyPipeline.