Word: pharma
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...jackpot, the payoff can be enormous: Roche's pharmaceutical division alone raked in more than $30 billion in sales last year. Its total sales reached $43 billion, generating profits of $10.5 billion. Nonetheless, the days of this trial-and-error approach may soon be over. All of Big Pharma is feeling pressure--from Wall Street, regulators and customers--to take a smarter path to discovery for that next blockbuster drug. And who wins vs. who is left behind is still very much...
Some of the latest weapons in Big Pharma's arsenal result from that understanding. Gleevec, for instance, treats one form of leukemia by zeroing in on the Philadelphia (Ph) chromosome, that part of the genome that directs bone marrow to keep making abnormal white blood cells. Because of drugs like Gleevec and therapies such as bone-marrow and stem-cell transplants, there are 12 million people walking around today who are classified as survivors...
...that cancer research funded by NIH/NCI or Big Pharma is somehow second-rate. "The last 30 or so years of concerted effort have led to a tremendously rich understanding. This is not a waste of time," says Jacks...
SU2C is not the only independent group shaking things up. The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation used a pay-for-results funding model that has more to do with Silicon Valley than Big Pharma to support research that in four years got four new treatments to patients--Thalomid, Velcade, Revlimid and Doxil. That's about six years faster than the decade it usually takes for such drug development and rollout. Multiple myeloma is a rare cancer of the bone marrow that sickens about 20,000 Americans each year--precisely the uncommon form of the disease that often falls into the research...
...SCORxE program - designed to educate physicians with unbiased and accurate information about prescription drugs. The basic issue: Should representatives of the program bring the doctors pizza for lunch? Sarah Ball, the indefatigable pharmacist who leads SCORxE, says no. The whole point of SCORxE, after all, is to counteract Big Pharma's hard-sell drug marketing. But sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, says Dr. Robert Malcolm, a psychiatrist and adviser to SCORxE. "We are competing with people who bring food," he says...