On April 1, 2025 Dizal (SSE:688192), a biopharmaceutical company committed to developing novel medicines for the treatment of cancer and immunological diseases, reported that results of its investigational drug candidates DZD8586 and DZD6008, have been selected for presentation at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) (Free ASCO Whitepaper) Annual Meeting, taking place May 30 – June 3, 2025, in Chicago (Press release, Dizal Pharma, APR 1, 2025, View Source [SID1234651733]).

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Oral and poster presentations of its DZD8586 study results in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are selected by ASCO (Free ASCO Whitepaper) Scientific Program Committee. In addition, Dizal will present its 4th generation EGFR TKI clinical data in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) during the conference.

About DZD8586

DZD8586 is a first-in-class, non-covalent, LYN/BTK dual inhibitor with full blood-brain barrier (BBB) penetration, designed as a potential treatment option for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (B-NHL).

While Bruton’s Tyrosine Kinase (BTK) inhibitors have been approved for the treatment of B-NHL, resistance can arise through two major mechanisms: the BTK C481X mutation and BTK-independent BCR signaling pathway activation. Currently, there is no targeted therapy available to address both resistance mechanisms, posing an urgent clinical challenge. Although BTK degraders have shown encouraging efficacy in early clinical studies, mutation-related resistance has been reported, and degrader-related toxicities may affect long-term clinical application.

DZD8586 has high selectivity against other TEC family kinases (TEC, ITK, TXK and BMX). By targeting BTK and LYN, it blocks both BTK-dependent and -independent BCR-signaling pathways, effectively inhibiting tumor growth of B-NHLs in cell lines and in animal models. Phase I clinical trial suggests that DZD8586 exhibits favorable PK properties, good central nervous system (CNS) permeability, complete blockade of BCR signaling, and encouraging anti-tumor efficacy with good safety and tolerability in patients with B-NHL.

About DZD6008

DZD6008, is a novel, highly selective, full-BBB penetrant EGFR TKI, designed as a potential treatment option for advanced EGFR mutation positive (EGFRm) NSCLC.

Non-small cell lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene is one of the most common driver genes for NSCLC. Multiple agents can be used to treat patients with EGFR mutated NSCLC who develop resistance to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), but the clinical outcome was not satisfactory. Brain metastases (BM) are a leading cause of death and disease progression for NSCLC. Approximately 23%-30% of NSCLC patients are synchronous BM at their initial diagnosis. Previous studies reported that the 3-year cumulative rate of BMs ranges from 29.4% to 60.3% in patients with mutated EGFR.

Currently, the clinical benefits of existing treatments for third-generation EGFR TKI-resistant NSCLC are limited and DZD6008 is expected to fill the unmet medical needs. DZD6008 effectively inhibits EGFR-mutated tumor growth in cell lines and in animal models. Previous clinical studies have validated the design concept of the molecule and suggest that DZD6008 demonstrates good safety and efficacy in NSCLC patients with brain metastases who had failed third-generation EGFR TKI therapy or multiple lines of pre-treatments.

On April 1, 2025 Citius Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (the "Company") entered into a securities purchase agreement (the "Purchase Agreement") with a certain institutional investor for the issuance and sale, in a registered direct offering by the Company (the "Offering"), of 465,000 shares of the Company’s common stock, par value $0.001 per share (the "Shares"), and pre-funded warrants to purchase up to 1,274,131 shares of common stock (the "Pre-funded Warrants") at an offering price of $1.15 and $1.1499, respectively (Filing, 8-K, Citius Pharmaceuticals, APR 1, 2025, View Source [SID1234651752]). The Offering closed on April 2, 2025.

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The Pre-funded Warrants are exercisable immediately at an exercise price of $0.0001 per share and shall remain valid and exercisable until all the Pre-funded Warrants are exercised in full. A holder of a Pre-funded Warrant will not have the right to exercise any portion of its warrants if the holder, together with its affiliates, would beneficially own in excess of 4.99% (or 9.99% at the election of the holder prior to the date of issuance) of the number of shares of common stock outstanding immediately after giving effect to such exercise (the "Beneficial Ownership Limitation"); provided, however, that upon 61 days’ prior notice to the Company, the holder may increase or decrease the Beneficial Ownership Limitation, provided that in no event shall the Beneficial Ownership Limitation exceed 9.99%. The exercise price and number of shares of common stock issuable upon exercise are subject to appropriate adjustment in the event of stock dividends, stock splits, reorganizations or similar events affecting the common stock and the exercise price.

H.C. Wainwright and Co., LLC ("Wainwright") acted as the Company’s exclusive placement agent in connection with the Offering. In connection with the Offering, the Company agreed to pay Wainwright a cash fee of 7.0% of the gross proceeds the Company received in the Offering. The Company agreed to also reimburse Wainwright up to $25,000 for fees and expenses of legal counsel, $10,000 for non-accountable expenses and $10,000 for a clearing fee. In addition, the Company granted placement agent warrants to Wainwright, or its designees, to purchase up to 121,739 shares of the common stock (the "Placement Agent Warrants").

The Placement Agent Warrants have an exercise price equal to $1.4375 per share, are exercisable six months after issuance and will expire five years from the commencement of sales in the Offering. The exercise price and number of shares of common stock issuable upon exercise are subject to appropriate adjustment in the event of stock dividends, stock splits, reorganizations or similar events affecting the common stock and the exercise price. If there is no effective registration statement for the resale of the shares issuable upon exercise of the Placement Agent Warrants, holders of the Placement Agent Warrants may elect a "cashless" exercise, whereby they would receive the net number of shares of common stock determined according to a formula set forth in the Placement Agent Warrants. On the expiration date of the Placement Agent Warrants, any Placement Agent Warrants outstanding and unexercised will be automatically exercised via cashless exercise.

The net proceeds to the Company from the Offering were approximately $1.735 million, after deducting placement agent fees and other offering expenses payable by the Company. The Company anticipates using the net proceeds to support the commercial launch of LYMPHIR and general corporate purposes.

Pursuant to the Purchase Agreement, the Company agreed for a period of 30 days following the closing of the Offering not to issue, enter into an agreement to issue or announce the issuance or proposed issuance of the shares or any other securities convertible into, or exercisable or exchangeable for, shares of common stock, subject to certain exceptions.

The Offering was made pursuant to the Company’s effective registration statement on Form S-3 (File No. 333-277319), which was previously declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on March 1, 2024, including a prospectus supplement filed with the SEC on April 1, 2025.

The Purchase Agreement contains customary representations and warranties and agreements of the Company and the investors and customary indemnification rights and obligations of the parties. The representations, warranties and covenants contained in the Purchase Agreement were made solely for the benefit of the parties to the Purchase Agreement and may be subject to limitations agreed upon by the contracting parties. Accordingly, the Purchase Agreement is incorporated herein by reference only to provide investors with information regarding the terms of the Purchase Agreement, and not to provide investors with any other factual information regarding the Company or its business, and should be read in conjunction with the disclosures in the Company’s periodic reports and other filings with the SEC.

The foregoing descriptions of the Purchase Agreement, the Pre-funded Warrants and the Placement Agent Warrants are qualified in their entirety by reference to the forms of the Purchase Agreement, the Pre-funded Warrants and the Placement Agent Warrants, copies of which are attached hereto as Exhibits 10.1, 4.1 and 4.2, respectively, and are incorporated herein by reference. A copy of the opinion of Wyrick Robbins Yates & Ponton LLP relating to the legality of the issuance and sale of the Shares, the Pre-funded Warrants and the Placement Agent Warrants in the Offering is attached as Exhibit 5.1 hereto.

On April 1, 2025 Moleculin Biotech, Inc., (Nasdaq: MBRX) ("Moleculin" or the "Company"), a late-stage pharmaceutical company with a broad portfolio of drug candidates targeting hard-to-treat cancers and viruses, reported the first patient has been dosed in its Phase 3 pivotal trial evaluating Annamycin in combination with Cytarabine (also known as "Ara-C" and for which the combination of Annamycin and Ara-C is referred to as "AnnAraC") for the treatment of AML patients who are refractory to or relapsed after induction therapy (R/R AML) (Press release, Moleculin, APR 1, 2025, View Source [SID1234651718]). This Phase 3 "MIRACLE" trial (derived from Moleculin R/R AML AnnAraC Clinical Evaluation) is a global approval trial, including sites in the US, Europe and the Middle East.

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"The start of patient dosing represents a huge milestone for Moleculin and importantly, the AML community," commented Walter Klemp, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Moleculin. "Our team remains focused on bringing clinical sites online in the U.S., Europe and Middle East and enrolling patients to build on this momentum. With the progress made to date, we expect to unblind preliminary data from the first 45 subjects in the second half of this year, a near-term, potentially value-driving milestone that will provide key insight as we continue to advance Annamycin’s development towards approval."

The MIRACLE study is a Phase 2B/3 clinical trial whereby data from the 2B portion will be combined with the Phase 3 portion for purposes of measuring its primary endpoint. MIRACLE is subject to appropriate future filings with and potential additional feedback from the FDA and their foreign equivalents, utilizes an adaptive design whereby the first 75 to 90 subjects will be randomized (1:1:1) in Part A of the trial to receive high dose cytarabine (HiDAC) combined with either placebo, 190 mg/m2 of Annamycin, or 230 mg/m2 of Annamycin, which Annamycin doses were specifically recommended by the FDA in the Company’s end of Phase 1B/2 meeting.

The protocol for the MIRACLE trial allows for the unblinding of preliminary primary efficacy data (Complete Remission or CR) and safety/tolerability of the three arms at 45 subjects, in addition to the conclusion of Part A (at 75 to 90 subjects). The first early unblinding will yield 30 subjects treated with Annamycin (190mg/m2 and 230/m2) and HiDAC and 15 subjects treated with just HiDAC. The Company expects to reach the first unblinding (45 subjects) in the second half of 2025, in addition to the second unblinding, which is expected in the first half of 2026. This accelerated estimated timeline is due in part to the positive response the Company received in meetings during December with potential investigators regarding recruitment for the trial.

For Part B of the trial, approximately 220 additional subjects will be randomized to receive either HiDAC plus placebo or HiDAC plus the optimum dose of Annamycin (randomized 1:1). The selection of the optimum dose will be based on the overall balance of safety, pharmacokinetics and efficacy, consistent with the FDA’s new Project Optimus initiative.

For more information about the MIRACLE trial, visit clinicaltrials.gov and reference identifier NCT06788756.

Annamycin currently has Fast Track Status and Orphan Drug Designation from the FDA for the treatment of relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia, in addition to Orphan Drug Designation for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma. Furthermore, Annamycin has Orphan Drug Designation for the treatment of relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

On April 1, 2025 Hengrui Pharmaceuticals reported the 5-year long-term follow-up data from the CameL-sq study-a randomized, double-blind, multicenter, phase III trial that evaluated the efficacy and safety of camrelizumab vs. placebo in combination with carboplatin and paclitaxel as first-line treatment of advanced squamous non-small cell lung cancer (sq-NSCLC) with negative driver genes (Press release, Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, APR 1, 2025, View Source;year-survival-of-patients-with-advanced-squamous-lung-cancer—a-potential–paradigm-shift-in-clinical-outcome-for-this-difficult-to-treat-population-302416809.html [SID1234651734]). The results show that the 5-year overall survival (OS) rate for patients treated with camrelizumab plus chemotherapy was 27.8%, indicating that more than one-quarter of the patients survived beyond five years., and a 15.3% improvement over the placebo-chemotherapy group (12.5%). Additionally, camrelizumab significantly reduced the risk of mortality by 43%, enabling more patients to achieve long-term survival.

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The five-year survival rate serves as a critical indicator for assessing potential clinical cure in oncology. China’s Healthy China 2030 initiative has established an ambitious target to increase the overall five-year survival rate for cancer patients by 15%. Epidemiologic data from the National Cancer Center consistently identify lung cancer as the malignancy with the highest incidence and mortality rates across both genders. However, early symptoms of lung cancer are frequently overlooked, resulting in most patients being diagnosed at an advanced stage. In the era dominated by traditional chemotherapy, the five-year survival rate for patients with advanced lung cancer was below 10%. Among histologic subtypes, squamous NSCLC presents unique challenges as it does not benefit from targeted therapies, leading to relatively poor survival outcomes. With the advent of immunotherapy drugs, the prognosis for squamous NSCLC has significantly improved; however, numerous unmet clinical needs remain.

Camrelizumab is a humanized IgG4 monoclonal antibody independently developed by Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. With high binding affinity to PD-1, it has been shown to significantly improve the overall survival of patients with various solid tumors, including lung cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, and nasopharyngeal cancer. At the 2024 ELCC, the long-term follow-up data from the CameL study were presented, highlighting the efficacy of camrelizumab in combination with chemotherapy as a first-line treatment for advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer. The findings revealed that approximately one-third of the patients achieved a survival duration exceeding five years.

The significant clinical benefits of camrelizumab plus chemotherapy as demonstrated by the CameL-sq study ( an increase of 15.3% in the five year survival rate compared to the control group), represent a meaningful advancement toward the goals outlined in the Healthy China 2030 blueprint for cancer prevention and control. This breakthrough represents another significant contribution from Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, a leading innovator in China’s pharmaceutical sector, to prolong and improve the lives of cancer patients worldwide.

On April 1, 2025 US NCI reported new form of tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, a form of personalized cancer immunotherapy, dramatically improved the treatment’s effectiveness in patients with metastatic gastrointestinal cancersExit Disclaimer, according to results of a clinical trial led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Press release, US NCI, APR 1, 2025, View Source [SID1234651719]). The findings, published April 1, 2025, in Nature Medicine, offer hope that this therapy could be used to treat a variety of solid tumors, which has so far eluded researchers developing cell-based therapies.

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This form of therapy involves identifying and selecting immune cells (TILs) that are found in the tumor that specifically recognize and attack a patient’s tumor cells. Next, scientists grow those TILs into large quantities in the laboratory before they are finally administered to the patient.

Patients in the clinical trial, who had a variety of gastrointestinal tumors, also received the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to help further boost their immune response. The result was nearly 24% of patients treated with selected TILs plus pembrolizumab had a substantial reduction in the size of their tumors, compared with 7.7% of patients who received selected TILs without pembrolizumab. Patients treated with TILs that had not been selected for anti-tumor activity had no tumor shrinkage.

"We’re seeing the first extension of cellular therapy with TILs into the common solid cancers," said Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s lead investigator at NIH’s National Cancer Institute. "We see a little crack in the solid wall of cancer by using cell-based immunotherapy for the common solid cancers, and we think we have ways to open that crack even further."

The clinical trial included 91 patients with metastatic gastrointestinal cancers—including esophageal, stomach, pancreatic, colon, and rectal cancers—that had worsened despite a median of four prior treatment regimens. In the pilot phase of the trial, 18 patients were treated with TILs that had not been selected for anti-tumor activity, and there were no objective responses (tumor shrinkage of at least 30% is considered an objective response). In the second phase, 39 patients were treated with selected TIL therapy, and three (7.7%) had objective responses.

In the third phase, 34 patients received pembrolizumab immediately before selected TIL therapy to prevent the newly introduced immune cells from becoming inactivated by the patient’s own immune system. This group had the best response, with 8 of 34 (23.5%) patients experiencing an objective response. All 91 patients had also received standard chemotherapy and high-dose interleukin-2 before the TIL therapy.

In the trial’s second and third phases, objective responses were seen in multiple types of gastrointestinal cancers, including cancers of the colon, rectum, pancreas, and bile duct. Responses lasted between 8 months and more than 5.8 years in the group that received selected TIL therapy alone, and between 4 months and 3.5 years in the group that received selected TIL therapy and pembrolizumab. Serious side effects occurred in 30% of patients treated with selected TILs.

The researchers are now developing methods to identify TILs that recognize multiple, specific proteins within a tumor, known as neoantigens, to help increase the number of patients who respond to selected TIL therapy with pembrolizumab.

TIL therapy, developed in the late 1980s by Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues at NIH, uses an individual’s own TILs to fight their tumor cells. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first TIL therapy for a solid cancer, lifileucel (Amtagvi), for treating advanced melanoma.