(Yicai) Sept. 9 -- Akeso’s stock price surged after the Chinese drugmaker announced highly promising results for an innovative lung cancer treatment it has developed. 

Akeso [HKG: 9926] closed up 15.8 percent at HKD55.80 (USD7.84) a share in Hong Kong today, bringing its gains so far this year to just over 20 percent.

At this year’s World Conference on Lung Cancer yesterday, Akeso released the results of a China-based randomized, double-blind phase III clinical trial comparing its drug Ivonescimab with a leading treatment by Merck Sharp & Dohme called pembrolizumab and know commercially as Keytruda. 

Compared with patients taking Keytruda, those using Ivonescimab saw a notable increase in their progression-free survival period. The group using Ivonescimab had better results than the Keytruda group regardless of age and gender or whether patients had issues such as liver and brain metastasis, the results showed.

MSD has long been a world leader in immunotherapy for solid tumors, and with sales of USD25 billion, Keytruda was the biggest-selling drug globally last year. So besting Keytruda in the head-to-head clinical trial points not only to substantial progress in treatment, but also to Ivonescimab's huge commercial potential.

Ivonescima has not yet received approval as a treatment for advanced programmed death ligand 1-positive non-small cell lung cancer. But according to Akeso, the application to sell the drug as such a treatment has been accepted by China’s National Medical Products Administration, and is set to be approved next year.

A therapy treating non-squamous NSCLC using Ivonescimab and two other drugs in conjunction won regulatory approval for sales in China this May. 

Zhongshan-based Akeso turned a net loss of CNY1.4 billion in 2022 into a net profit of CNY1.9 billion (USD267 million) last year, its first since going public, the firm said on March 18. Revenue skyrocketed more than five-fold to CNY4.5 billion.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Tom Litting