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MADRID — A novel type of immunotherapy from Amgen generated strong response rates in patients with advanced small cell lung cancer, results that could lead to the approval of the drug.

The data, reported here Friday at the annual meeting of European Society for Medical Oncology, come from a Phase 2 trial of the drug, called tarlatamab. But they drew greater interest because Amgen has described the study as “potentially registrational,” and the trial results were also published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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“It’s a single arm study, but the results are amazing,” said Silke Gillessen, the scientific chair of ESMO 2023 and an oncologist at the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland, noting that advances in small cell lung cancer have been slow to come.

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