LintonPharm has announced that preliminary results of Catumaxomab for advanced Gastric Cancer (GC) with peritoneal metastasis is published online at the 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

Abstract Title：Global multi-center phase I trial of the intraperitoneal infusion of anti-EpCAM x anti-CD3 bispecific antibody catumaxomab for advanced gastric carcinoma with peritoneal metastasis.

The abstract is about the cohort A, stage I of the ongoing global phase Ⅲ trial that evaluating the safety and efficacy of Catumaxomab in advanced GC patients with peritoneal metastasis. Worldwide, GC is one of the most common cancers, contributing to more than 1 million cases per year and 5.6% of all cancer diagnoses. Approximately 50% of the advanced GC patients will develop peritoneal metastasis after radical resection, along with malignant ascites in most cases. Furthermore, peritoneal metastasis is associated with poor prognosis and quality of life compared with metastasis to other organs. Peritoneal metastasis is treated with systemic therapies. The estimated survival period for the patients who fail to respond to third-line therapy is limited to only 2.3-2.4 months according to multiple RCTs.

In our study, 9 GC patients with peritoneal metastasis (33% had failed third-line therapy) were treated with Catumaxomab, the median overall survival was 3.4 months, with remarkable ascites regression. Catumaxomab as an T cell engaging immunotherapy has showed promising early efficacy signals.

Catumaxomab was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2009 for the treatment of malignant ascites. It is a bispecific antibody that binds to EpCAM (the epithelial cell adhesion molecule) on the tumor cell--and CD3 on the T cell, recruits immune accessory cells through FcγR binding at the same time. Catumaxomab kills tumor cells by engaging T cell and accessory cell mediated cytotoxicity and has the potential to induce long-term vaccinal effects which has been verified in animal models. Currently, Catumaxomab is being evaluated in clinical trials for both advanced gastric cancer (NCT04222114) and non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NCT04799847).