The need-to-know on KRAS

Amgen stole the spotlight at this year’s major oncology meeting with early data from a drug that targets KRAS, a wily protein implicated in a host of cancers. But Amgen is by no means the only game in town when it comes to drugging so-called undruggable targets.

As STAT’s Adam Feuerstein explains, a small outfit called Mirati Therapeutics is at work on a KRAS-directed treatment of its own, expecting to report data from a small trial later this year. Thanks to Amgen, we now have a bar for efficacy: If Mirati wants to supplant the biotech giant, it’ll need to beat a 50% rate of partial responses in patients with lung cancer.

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