Word: cancerous
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...most likely hold the future of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche. On each sits one of some 920,000 drug compounds Roche owns, which the researchers at its U.S. headquarters spend their day mixing and matching in the hope of finding the next cure for diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis or even cancer. Until now, however, 9 out of 10 times these searches have yielded only dead ends...
...rivals, Roche sees diagnostic machines and test kits as crucial to assessing and treating disease in the future. That belief, in turn, has led to a laser-sharp focus on "personalized medicine." So, for example, an oncologist will use a genetic test to pinpoint the exact kind of cancer her patient has and then proceed with a highly specific treatment course of Roche drugs. "For a long time, we acted as if all cancers are homogeneous," says David Heimbrook, Roche's V.P. for oncology discovery. "Now, because we can quickly analyze a tumor in greater detail, we have a much...
...demand for cancer drugs, for one, will grow exponentially with this treatment approach. But more important, Roche can now use biomarkers to determine much earlier in the R&D process whether a drug will pan out. Down the pipeline, diagnostics identify which patients most benefit from a therapy, giving clinical trials tailored to that subset a better chance of succeeding. Moreover, any patient for whom the drug wouldn't work or whom the drug could harm can be excluded...
These tools can also grant older medications a new lease on life. Take the cancer drug MabThera, sold in the U.S. as Rituxan. MabThera was originally developed to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In 2006, Roche scientists noticed--again using biomarkers--that it was also extremely effective in certain cases of rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune condition that causes joint inflammation. Roche's sales to arthritis patients have already totaled more than $420 million...
...which scientists have been using to create iPS cells, these viruses effectively disappear after a few cell divisions and do not integrate into the cells’ DNA. The effect of this is that adenoviruses are free from the chief adverse effect of genetic manipulation, which can turn on cancer genes and trigger malignant tumor growth...