Hengrui Pharmaceutical's innovative drug HRS-4357 injection has been approved for clinical use in prostate cancer

On July 10th, Hengrui Medicine announced that its subsidiary, Tianjin Hengrui Medicine Co., Ltd., has received the drug clinical trial approval notification issued by the National Medical Products Administration for HRS-4357 injection. The approval allows the product to enter clinical trials for use in adult patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who are positive for prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) and have received prior treatment with androgen receptor (AR) pathway inhibitors and taxane chemotherapy.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men, with millions of new cases diagnosed each year, making it a significant threat to men's health. The five-year survival rate of prostate cancer in China is 66.4%, much lower than the 98.2% rate in the United States, largely due to the lack of mature and effective diagnostic and therapeutic methods. In January 2019, the National Cancer Center released the latest incidence and mortality rates of malignant tumors in China in 2015, which showed that there were 72,000 new cases of prostate cancer, with an incidence rate of 10.23 per 100,000, making it one of the fastest-growing cancers in terms of incidence and mortality.

For advanced prostate cancer, currently available systemic treatments in China include endocrine therapy and chemotherapy. While these treatments can provide short-term disease control, drug resistance inevitably occurs due to various mechanisms, leading to disease progression.

Compared to traditional therapies, nuclear medicine has the natural advantage of "visible treatment." The development of radiopharmaceuticals targeting PSMA for tumor diagnosis and treatment has broad prospects. HRS-4357 injection is Hengrui Medicine's first innovative drug approved for clinical trials in the field of nuclear medicine and is expected to provide a new treatment option for prostate cancer patients.