HQ Team
June 30, 2025: Amgen Inc.’s experimental drug to treat advanced gastric cancer, in combination with chemotherapy, showed that people lived longer compared to chemotherapy alone, according to a company statement.
The new drug, called bemarituzumab, targets the FGFR2b protein on cells that help the cancer grow and spread, which traditional treatments don’t directly address.
A majority of gastric cancers have too much of the FGFR2b protein, which sends signals that make cancer cells multiply and survive. This makes the cancer more aggressive and harder to treat with the usual chemotherapy.
Standard chemotherapy and some targeted drugs help only a small group of patients and often extend life by just a few months. Other targeted therapies for stomach cancer have not worked well in clinical trials.
Drugs like bemarituzumab specifically attach to FGFR2b on cancer cells, blocking the signals that promote tumour growth and helping the immune system attack these cells. This precision can improve treatment effectiveness and reduce damage to healthy cells.
High levels of FGFR2b
Clinical studies show that patients whose tumours have high FGFR2b levels tend to have worse survival, so targeting this protein could fill an important treatment gap and improve survival rates.
FGFR2b offers a new way to fight tumours that don’t respond well to existing treatments
Amgen stated that more detailed results will be shared later, and Amgen is also testing this drug combined with another medicine called nivolumab in ongoing studies.
Gastric cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, with nearly one million new cases and over 650,000 deaths globally each year.
“Most patients with gastric cancer are diagnosed at an advanced stage, with poor prognosis, low survival rates and limited therapeutic options,” said Jay Bradner, MD, Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Amgen.
Neutropenia
“These first positive top-line results of an FGFR2b targeted monoclonal antibody from our Phase 3 FORTITUDE-101 study mark a meaningful advance in the development of effective targeted therapy for gastric cancer.”
The most common side-effects in patients treated with bemarituzumab plus chemotherapy were reduced visual acuity, punctate keratitis, anaemia, neutropenia, nausea, corneal epithelium defect and dry eye.
The end-stage trials on 547 patients across 37 nations were conducted with the support of Zai Lab. Zai Lab holds co-development and commercialisation rights for bemarituzumab for mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
