AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s Enhertu has been approved in the European Union as monotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with advanced HER2-positive gastric or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) adenocarcinoma who have received a prior trastuzumab-based regimen.

Enhertu is a specifically engineered HER2-directed antibody drug conjugate (ADC) being jointly developed and commercialized by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo.

“Today’s important approval makes Enhertu the first HER2-directed medicine to be approved for gastric cancer in the European Union in more than a decade. Patients across the EU with advanced HER2-positive disease who have progressed following treatment in the first-line setting, may now have the opportunity to benefit from treatment with Enhertu,” says Dave Fredrickson, Executive Vice President, Oncology Business Unit, AstraZeneca.

Based on the DESTINY-Gastric02 and DESTINY-Gastric01 Phase II trials

The approval by the European Commission follows the positive opinion of the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use in November 2022 and is based on results from the DESTINY-Gastric02 and DESTINY-Gastric01 Phase II trials.

In DESTINY-Gastric02, which enrolled patients from North America and Europe, treatment with Enhertu resulted in a confirmed objective response rate (ORR) of 41.8% as assessed by independent central review (ICR). Median duration of response (DoR) was 8.1 months.

In DESTINY-Gastric01, which enrolled patients from Japan and South Korea, treatment with Enhertu resulted in a confirmed ORR of 40.5% versus 11.3% with chemotherapy (irinotecan or paclitaxel) as assessed by ICR. The median DoR was 11.3 months with Enhertu versus 3.9 months with chemotherapy. Patients treated with Enhertu had a 41% reduction in the risk of death versus patients treated with chemotherapy (based on a hazard ratio of 0.59; 95% confidence interval: 0.39-0.88; p=0.0097) with a median overall survival (OS) of 12.5 months versus 8.4 months.

Approximately 136,000 cases of gastric cancer are diagnosed annually in Europe, where it represents the sixth leading cause of cancer death. Gastric cancer is typically diagnosed in the advanced stage. Even when the disease is diagnosed at earlier stages, the survival rate remains modest.3,4 Approximately one in five gastric cancers are HER2-positive.

In both trials, the safety profiles observed in patients treated with Enhertu were consistent with those seen in other trials of Enhertu with no new safety signals identified.

Enhertu is also approved in the US and several other countries for locally advanced or metastatic HER2-positive gastric cancer.

Photo of Dave Fredrickson: AstraZeneca