2025 Report to the Community - Flipbook - Page 24
Discovery & Innovation Highlights
Advancing care through clinical trials
Hollings offers about 200 clinical trials at any one time.
In fiscal year 2025, two of those trials culminated in new
FDA drug approvals.
In August 2024, Hollings’ neuro-oncologists celebrated
the FDA approval of vorasidenib to treat certain types of
gliomas with a specific gene mutation.
In May 2024, the FDA approved tarlatamab for
patients whose extensive small cell lung cancer has not
responded or stopped responding to chemotherapy.
“This kind of breakthrough hasn’t happened in decades,”
said Alicia Zukas, M.D. “This is a targeted therapy and
a first of its kind for brain tumors.”
It’s a bi-specific T-cell engager, or BiTE, a type of
targeted therapy that looks for two targets: with one
arm, it grabs onto a T-cell, a type of immune cell, and
with the other arm, it attaches to a cancer cell, bringing
the two cells closer together so that the T-cell can better
recognize and kill the cancer cell. Up to this point, BiTE
therapies have been approved only for blood cancers.
Hollings contributed to the research that led to the
approval. Hollings was the only trial site in South
Carolina during the INDIGO trial, an international
Phase 3 clinical trial that showed that the drug
vorasidenib significantly lengthened the amount of time
that people lived without the cancer progressing.
Even before the approval, Mariam Alexander, M.D.,
Ph.D., had treated patients with this drug through a
clinical trial, so she was delighted with the FDA approval.
“What they’re seeing with tarlatamab is a durable
response, so the patients who are responding continue
to respond for a long time, and it doesn’t have the
toxicities of chemotherapy,” Alexander explained.
Not only could people participating in the trial benefit
from early access to the drug, but the doctors and their
future patients benefited from the experience gained.
The care teams at Hollings gain experience with the
ins and outs of a specific medication before it hits the
market, Zukas said, and they’re ready to work with the
medication as soon as it’s approved rather than needing
to learn the drug and its protocols.
Clinical trials explore promising new approaches for cancer prevention,
diagnosis and treatment, often providing access to new drugs and
interventions before they become widely available.
SCAN FOR CLINICAL
TRIALS WEBPAGE
22
MUSC Hollings Cancer Center
