Word: merck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...position, mindlessly ordering the cell to divide again and again. It plays a role in 90% of pancreatic cancers, 50% of colon cancers and 25% of lung cancers. Dr. Edward Scolnick discovered the RAS gene in rats while working at the National Cancer Institute in 1978. Now president of Merck Research Laboratories, he is overseeing the development of a drug that stops the RAS protein from sending its malignant message. Several other big drug companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson and Schering-Plough, are testing similar drugs. "We think the odds are that if you treat people with...
...cure cancer. Cancer is a complicated disease. Tumors usually are made up of different types of cells, expressing different genes, sensitive to different growth factors and therefore responding to different drugs. "When you are trying to kill cancer cells, you're always likely to need combination treatment," says Merck's Scolnick. Like AIDS treatments, the new generation of cancer drugs will need to be combined with older drugs and possibly with one another to be most effective...
...sector. Sensing opportunity, New York investor Stuart Wiesbrod founded Merlin Biomed, a private health-care fund, just three months ago. He estimates that the entire biotech industry has a stock-market value of about $110 billion. That's less than the market value of one big drug company like Merck or Pfizer, each with market values around $140 billion. Yet the biotech industry has 600 drugs in advanced development, vs. maybe 20 for each big drug company...
GOOD HAIR DAYS With as many as 50% of the American men who are 50 or older scratching their heads over male-pattern baldness, Propecia, made by Merck (1997 sales: $23.6 billion), is the first pill that aims to grow back hair. The company says two-thirds of the men who took Propecia in clinical trials sprouted natural-looking hair. Sales of the drug, which Merck launched in January, could approach $750 million by 2000. One rare (less than 2%) side effect: depressed libido. Propecia and Viagra cocktails, anyone...
...have made the cost of developing a single drug between $400 and $600 million -- about four times what it was 20 years ago. A combined Glaxo and SmithKline could have sunk $3 billion into research and development, compared to $1.8 billion for Novartis AG and $1.5 billion each for Merck & Co. and Pfizer...