AstraZeneca's Tagrisso-Orpathys combo may extend life even after drug resistance

AstraZeneca reported Sunday at the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Madrid that pairing Tagrisso with an experimental drug, orpathys, may allow some patients with mutant non-small cell lung cancer to continue benefiting from Tagrisso even after their disease develops resistance to the EGFR-targeting tyrosine kinase inhibitor.

Tagrisso, known generically as osimertinib, is AstraZeneca’s EGFR inhibitor and one of its top-selling oncology drugs. Resistance to such inhibitors is a recognized limitation in treating EGFR-mutant lung cancer, as tumors often develop mechanisms to bypass the drug’s target over time. Orpathys, a MET inhibitor, addresses one such bypass mechanism, MET amplification, which is among the pathways tumors use to escape EGFR-targeted therapy.

According to the company’s presentation at the Madrid congress, combining the two drugs after resistance emerged showed signals of extending the clinical benefit patients derive from Tagrisso, rather than switching them immediately to a different treatment regimen.

The data were presented under the ESMO26 congress banner, part of a broader slate of oncology findings disclosed at the meeting. AstraZeneca did not, according to the available reporting, specify a timeline for regulatory submission or further trial phases based on these results.

The findings were reported by Endpoints News, which covered the presentation from Madrid on October 25, 2026.