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Shares of Prima Biomed (PBMD) were up 266% today after the company reported positive phase 2 results in second remission Ovarian Cancer patients. These trial results stem from a phase 2 trial known as CAN-003 which used the company’s drug CVac to attempt to increase overall survival and possibly increase progression-free survival. The phase 2 trial recruited 63 patients who were either given CVac or a placebo product. The patients in the trial recruited were either on first remission or second remission.
CVac is a cancer vaccine in which the company is able to modify patients’ cells ex vivo – meaning outside the body – by binding a mannan+MUC1 fusion protein and then reintroducing the modified cells back into the body to fight cancer cells.
What remission means is that each patient that either took first-line treatment or second-line treatment were able to slightly shrink their tumor but the cancer was still there. The primary endpoint of the trial was to determine progression-free survival — the amount of time a patient takes a treatment without their cancer progressing. The secondary endpoint was overall survival, which measures how long a patient survives over the course of the treatment.
For example the 20 patients in the second remission group that took CVac were able to achieve a median overall survival of 42 months compared to placebo in which survival averaged 25.53 months. This means that patients treated with CVac lived on average 16 month longer than the placebo patients. The overall survival results confirm a hazard ratio of .17 and if you subtract that from 1 you get .83 which converts to 83%. That means that the risk of the patients dying in the group that took CVac is reduced by 83%.
In terms of progression-free survival (PFS), patients who took CVac obtained a PFS rate of greater than 12.91 months and the placebo group only saw a PFS rate of 4.94 months.
