Elenagen helps women with ovarian cancer live 1 year longer
Adding therapy to chemo shown to extend survival in small cancer trial
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Adding Elenagen, Curelab Oncology’s experimental anticancer medication, to gemcitabine chemotherapy may help women with treatment-resistant ovarian cancer live significantly longer.
Those are the results of a small clinical trial, conducted at a single center in Belarus, that found that women with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer who received Elenagen plus gemcitabine lived about one year longer on average than those treated with gemcitabine alone.
With Elenagen, overall survival averaged 25 months, or slightly longer than two years, compared with 13 months without.
These findings come from the company’s now-completed Phase 2 clinical trial (NCT05979298), and will be presented at the 27th Congress of the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology (ESGO 2026), to be held Feb. 26-28, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The presentation will be given by Gabriel Levin, MD, a gynecologic oncologist at the McGill University Health Centre in Canada and director of oncology at Curelab.
“What initially started as a cancer vaccine, now evolved [into] a comprehensive adjuvant [add-on treatment] filling the gaps of current anti-cancer therapies,” Alexander Shneider, PhD, CEO of Curelab, said in a press release calling the trial a “landmark” study. It involved adults with ovarian cancer whose disease returned after treatment.
Results from the trial were also detailed in “Elenagen, a p62/SQSTM1-encoding plasmid, improves overall survival in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer: a phase II trial,” a study published in the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer.
First-line treatment for ovarian cancer often involves surgery and platinum-based chemotherapy drugs. While many patients with this form of gynecological cancer respond at first, the disease can become platinum-resistant, meaning it no longer responds to these drugs. When that happens, treatment options are limited, and outcomes are often poor.
One-quarter of patients on Elenagen survived for over 4 years
Elenagen is a DNA-based therapy that carries the gene for the human p62/SQSTM1 protein. This protein is involved in how tumors grow, spread, and become resistant to treatment. Elenagen works by lowering chronic inflammation and reshaping the tumor environment. This helps the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells more effectively.
The treatment demonstrated antitumor activity in preclinical studies and also showed a favorable safety and preliminary efficacy profile in a Phase 1/2a trial that enrolled people with different types of solid tumors. In particular, Elenagen restored tumor sensitivity to chemotherapy, according to the developer.
The Phase 2 trial enrolled 30 people with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Participants were randomly assigned to receive gemcitabine on days one and eight of a 21-day cycle, or gemcitabine plus Elenagen, given by intramuscular injection once weekly. Gemcitabine is the standard treatment for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.
Patients in both groups had a similar average age — 56 in the gemcitabine group and 54 in the Elenagen group — and most had grade 3 tumors, which means their cancer cells looked very abnormal under a microscope and were more aggressive. The majority had cancer that spread to the lining of the abdominal cavity and were previously treated with one platinum-based therapy line.
Among patients with elevated CA-125 levels, a biomarker of ovarian cancer, Elenagen was associated with a clinically meaningful, 12-month improvement in overall survival (13 months vs. 25 months) and a 59% reduction in the risk of death. Also, about one-quarter of patients in the Elenagen group survived more than 48 months, or longer than four years.
The researchers noted that women with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer and high CA-125 levels are at the greatest risk and generally have a poorer prognosis than other patients.
What makes these results remarkable is not only the magnitude of the survival benefit, but that it was achieved without added toxicity.
The median duration of Elenagen treatment was 10.2 months (range 0.7–30.8 months). Longer exposure to Elenagen strongly correlated with improved overall survival and longer survival after treatment discontinuation, particularly within the first 12 months, the data showed.
Because treatment duration was limited in this study, the reported overall survival benefit is considered a conservative, lower-bound estimate, according to the researchers. Based on these findings, future U.S. and European trials will allow treatment for up to two years to maximize potential benefit.
“What makes these results remarkable is not only the magnitude of the survival benefit, but that it was achieved without added toxicity,” said study coauthor Sergei Krasny, MD, PhD. “This suggests a fundamentally different therapeutic approach — one that supports the body’s biology rather than simply intensifying chemotherapy.”
