The annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research is a chance for drug companies to showcase new and emerging ways to attack tumors. The gathering typically focuses on early research and clinical work, the studies developers use to build confidence in the larger and longer trials to come.

This year’s meeting was no different. Over the weekend, trial investigators revealed new data for the kind of immunotherapies and targeted medicines that have captured the attention of investors and drugmakers in recent years.

Read on for a look at three of the more notable datasets at this year’s meeting:

Revolution’s second act

Over the last year or so, Revolution Medicines joined the ranks of the biopharmaceutical industry’s most valuable companies. The recent success of its lead drug in testing against a tough-to-treat pancreatic tumor has positioned the company to unlock what’s believed to be a more than $10 billion market opportunity.

AACR is “buzzing with excitement” following the study results, and more data on that therapy are coming this week, wrote Stifel analyst Laura Prendergast. But the meeting also featured a second Revolution drug that may be “underappreciated,” she wrote.

That treatment is known as zoldonrasib. Like Revolution’s other therapies, zoldonrasib is aimed at a kind of “RAS” protein implicated in cancer growth. But whereas the company’s pancreatic cancer medicine aims at multiple RAS proteins, zoldonrasib blocks a specific variant, “G12D,” that occurs in about 4% of people with non-small cell lung cancer. This variant is different than the one targeted by marketed medicines from Bristol Myers Squibb and Amgen.

Zoldonrasib is being evaluated in an early-stage trial of people whose solid tumors harbor this G12D variant. Among a subset of 27 patients who have non-small cell lung cancer and were previously given immunotherapy and chemotherapy, the drug held tumors in check for a median of 11.1 months. Some 52% responded to treatment, and around 73% were still alive after a year, Revolution said Sunday.

The findings represent a “clear improvement” over chemotherapy, which historically delivers around a 4-month benefit on tumor progression, wrote Leonid Timashev, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. Timashev added that despite the study’s small size and different patient populations, the results also “compare favorably” with other targeted therapies being tested in the second-line setting and appear “definitively better” than what’s been seen with G12C-targeting agents.

The benefits on progression-free survival also surpass a 10-month threshold some experts believe could support an “accelerated approval,” according to Stifel’s Prendergast. A Phase 3 study is expected to begin shortly.

Merck’s PD-1/VEGF reveal

Merck & Co. is a relative latecomer in the push to see whether drugs that simultaneously block the proteins PD-1 and VEGF, two well-known cancer targets, will prove a meaningful step forward in cancer care.

The pharmaceutical giant is well behind the field’s leaders, Akeso and Summit Therapeutics, as well as others like BioNTech that have prospects in advanced testing. But early data presented at AACR this weekend suggest Merck’s entrant in the PD-1/VEGF race — a drug it acquired from China-based biotech LaNova Medicines in 2024 — “are sufficient to warrant further development,” wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Trung Huynh.

The results come from a first-in-human study of Merck’s drug, MK-2010, in China. The study enrolled patients whose non-small cell lung cancers are positive for a protein, PD-L1, associated with an immunotherapy response. According to Huynh’s Friday note, study data show that 11 of 20 previously untreated patients, or 55%, who received the lower of two tested doses responded to treatment.

The response rate was slightly lower, at 44%, among those who received a higher dose.

The most common side effects associated with treatment were those often associated with VEGF inhibitors, among them hypertension and excess protein in the urine. Adverse events judged by investigators as “severe” or worse occurred in 17% of those on the lower dose and 27% of patients on the higher.

Though cross-trial comparisons can be misleading, these response rates are “in line with competitors,” among them Akeso and Summit’s ivonescimab and BioNTech’s pumitamig, wrote Huynh. The update puts Merck “back in contention” in the PD-1/VEGF pace, albeit with data that “lacks a distinctive edge,” the analyst added.

A battle of next-gen lung cancer drugs

About 2% of people with non-small cell lung cancer have alterations in a gene known as ROS1. Multiple drugs are available for these cancers, among them Pfizer’s Xalkori, Roche’s Rozlytrek and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Augtyro. But they’ve largely struggled commercially, leading to skepticism from Wall Street analysts about their sales potential.

Two biotech companies, Nuvation Bio and Nuvalent, are hoping for better luck. Both are touting newer treatments designed to improve upon earlier drugs in one way or another, hoping these enhanced properties will lead to better sales uptake. The Food and Drug Administration approved Nuvation’s drug, Ibtrozi, last year; Nuvalent’s zidesamtinib could follow by mid-September. The companies are both presenting fresh results at AACR.

Nuvalent provided updates from a study testing zidesamtinib in advanced, ROS-1 positive non-small cell lung cancer. Some of the findings pertained to people who’d previously received Augtyro or Ibtrozi. In those patients, Nuvalent’s drug was associated with response rates of 41% and 47%, respectively. The responses lasted a median of 15.7 months in those who’d gotten Augtyro; that figure hasn’t yet been reached in those who’d received Ibtrozi before.

To Jefferies’ Roger Song, Nuvalent's data “strengthens confidence” in zidesamtinib’s ability to deliver “durable, CNS-active” disease control and tolerability “suitable for chronic use,” overcoming a key issue with other therapies. Response rates of 44% and 71% were observed, respectively, in people with brain metastases, a leading cause of disease progression, he noted.

Nuvation, meanwhile, is providing a new look at durability data from two studies in patients who hadn’t yet received these kinds of “tyrosine kinase inhibitor” drugs. The findings show the median response to Ibtrozi has now increased to 50 months in duration. But Nuvation and Nuvalent’s drugs “look similar,” wrote RBC’s Timashev. Treatment preferences will “ultimately come down to individual decisions between patients and physicians” on the drugs’ relative side effect profiles and the “weight they place on length of efficacy follow-up.”