Word: herceptin
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Consider the plight of biotech firm Genentech in the early '90s. It had four promising drugs that it wanted to take into clinical trials one year, but it had resources for only three. On the bubble: the breast-cancer drug Herceptin. The R.-and-D. tax credit provided funds for Genentech to proceed with that fourth drug, which came to market last year and is now saving lives while ringing up sales of $75 million a quarter. With the tax credit, says Walter Moore, vice president of government affairs at Genentech, his company is able to pursue one additional drug...
...cells. In the past year alone, the FDA has approved three such drugs (for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, breast cancer and leukemia). And more are in the pipeline, because scientists are becoming increasingly skilled at designing drugs that target specific, critical molecular processes that tumor cells need to survive. Herceptin, for example, takes advantage of the fact that most breast-cancer cells overproduce a certain growth-factor protein; the drug preferentially seeks out tumor cells in which the protein's concentration is high...
...didn't really surprise me when I awoke one day to see a front-page newspaper story on c225, an experimental drug aimed at colon cancer. Was it the next Herceptin? For some insight, I sought out a few experts. "I think [the drug] has promise," said Dr. Derek Raghavan, chief of medical oncology at the University of Southern California. "But my take on listening to the talk wasn't that it was the breakthrough of the meeting." Nor, he implied, was it really necessarily worthy of Page One. And if you know a little about the drug-approval ritual...
DRUG WARNING Since its debut in 1998, Herceptin has stemmed the growth of breast cancer in tens of thousands of women. But now its maker, Genentech, is alerting doctors to possible adverse reactions and even death in a small percentage of patients who have a history of lung problems and did not respond to chemotherapy. A new label in the works will help doctors select the patients best suited for the gene-spliced drug. --By Janice M. Horowitz...
...biotech. "More than half of all new drugs approved today are coming out of the biotech sector," says Jim McCamant, editor of the Medical Technology Stock Letter in Berkeley, Calif. Some 350 biotech products are in trials, and more than 100 are on the market. Among recent blockbusters: Herceptin, a breast-cancer treatment from Genentech, and Enbrel, an arthritis medication from Immunex. Yet a few standouts hardly guarantee the success of an entire industry. That's where gene mapping becomes critical...