Roche Targets Emerging Oncology Market With New Lung-Cancer Drug

By Adria Calatayud

MADRID--Roche Holding said it expects a pill it is developing to become the new standard treatment for an advanced form of lung cancer, and the company's first shot at an emerging field within the oncology market.

The Swiss drugmaker is working on several drugs that target a driver of cancers that long eluded the industry. A breakthrough in pancreatic cancer from U.S. biotech Revolution Medicines put the field on investors' radar, and Roche aims to venture into it with lung-cancer medicine divarasib.

In study results presented Sunday at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Madrid, Roche said its drug lowered the risk of death by 44% compared with available treatments from Amgen and Bristol Myers Squibb. The late-stage clinical trial compared the effects of the drugs on patients with a specific type of lung cancer who had been previously treated.

Fewer participants who took divarasib dropped out of the trial due to side effects than those who received the existing drugs, Roche said.

"The data are practice-changing," Roche's Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Stefan Frings, said in an interview.

Divarasib is an oral drug designed to bind to a protein called KRAS G12C to turn off its tumor-driving signaling function. The so-called KRAS mutations are a subset of a driver of the proliferation of tumors known as RAS, and G12C is one of the most common forms.

Competition is heating up in the space, with Eli Lilly, Merck and Revolution Medicines all developing KRAS drugs, analysts at RBC Capital Markets said in a recent research note.

Frings said Roche is doubling down on the RAS pathway to treat cancer. The company's portfolio includes an experimental medicine that aims to block the different forms of RAS mutations and another one targeting KRAS G12C, both in early-stage studies.

For divarasib, Roche is conducting other late-stage clinical trials to test whether it works in earlier phases of the disease, either as a standalone treatment or in combination with Merck's Keytruda.

Frings said the results of the divarasib study, along with data from earlier trials presented at the congress of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in June, make Roche reasonably confident that divarasib could work as a first-line treatment.

The company last month raised its estimate for divarasib's annual peak sales to between 2 billion and 3 billion Swiss francs ($2.44 billion-$3.66 billion), up from between 1 billion and 2 billion francs earlier.

"We certainly are more hopeful now that it will be a good blockbuster," Frings said. "Treatment duration matters as well on peak sales and the treatment duration was certainly a lot longer than we had initially forecast."

Write to Adria Calatayud at adria.calatayud@wsj.com

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October 25, 2026 11:44 ET (15:44 GMT)