Two Promising Targets in Advanced Cervical Cancer

PIK3CA and ARID1A may be targets for drug development in recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer, according to research presented at the recent Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) annual meeting.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Krishnansu Tewari, MD, a gynecologic oncologist at the University of California Irvine, discusses the need for these new drugs in the pipeline.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

It’s always exciting to see investigators and industry interested in helping women with cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is a very difficult disease to treat because it is a disease that has ravaged the world globally.

There are 600,000 new cases every year, and over 300,000 women die needlessly. And the reason I say needlessly is because we have screening with pap smears and high-risk HPV DNA testing available, and we also have HPV vaccination. The problem is those type of modalities, screening and prevention, are typically only available for patients in developed countries. And so most of the disease burden in cervical cancer occurs in the third world — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, including India.

But still, even in the United States, a developed country, we don’t have universal healthcare and still we see 14,000 new cases every year and 3,000 deaths.

These deaths that are occurring in young women, they’re in their 40s and 50s, they’re in the midst of their careers or they have small children at home. So it’s really devastating.

At the SGO 2023 [meeting], Dr. Anjali Hari has shown there’s a couple of new molecular targets that may be druggable — PIK3CA and ARID1A.

There are drugs that target PIK3CA, they’ve been studied in other disease types, but based on her work in cervical cancer, this may be the time to start designing trials for women with cervical cancer to target that molecule. As far as ARID1A, there are drugs currently in development to target that pathway that is aberrantly expressed in cervical cancer also.

So that’s very promising. New drugs coming down the pipeline, most likely that may find a home in the cervical cancer treatment space.