Pfizer becomes competitive in oncology
pharmafile | May 24, 2005 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |
Pfizer looks set to become a serious contender in oncology with its promising phase III kidney cancer drug Sutent.
Until now the company has had virtually no presence in the area, but its growing importance has led the company to make it a priority area, and Pfizer now spends over 12% of its R&D in cancer.
Results for Sutent were unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which this year saw a huge amount of new data being presented by a wide range of companies with products in development.
ASCO has been dominated in the past few years by novel treatments from biotech companies, with pharma companies only stepping in to provide marketing muscle once therapies were shown to work.
Sutent, (SU11248) also showed promising results for the treatment of breast cancer and gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST) but will compete head to head in the kidney cancer market with sorafenib, currently being developed by Onyx and Bayer.
Both drugs are a new generation of cancer drugs which inhibit the flow of blood to tumours, killing off cells in the difficult to treat renal cancers.
Targeted therapies were previously deemed too risky in the early stages of cancer but the evidence for their effectiveness is mounting in the treatment of a number of cancers.
Clinical trial results suggest that Sutent is the more powerful of the two treatments, with data showing it shrank tumours in around 40% of patients involved in two trials involving 169 patients.
A phase III trial of around 900 patients showed that sorafenib shrank tumours by significant amounts in just 2% of patients.
But Pfizer's Sutent registered a higher rate of side-effects, including hypertension, fatigue and diarrhoea while the side-effects of sorafenib were mainly blistering and rashes.
Current kidney cancer treatments are minimally effective and hard to tolerate and there is no chemotherapy drug commonly used to treat other cancers which works well against it.
More than 6,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with kidney cancer each year while more than 30,000 are diagnosed in the US.
Onyx and Bayer are preparing to file sorafenib with the FDA but Pfizer has not disclosed whether it will file its drug on past trials or wait for results of a trial under way.
Pfizer will however file Sutent for approval for its first licence in GIST, where it has proved effective in patients resistant to Gleevec, Novartis' breakthrough next-generation cancer treatment.
Pfizer also presented new data on breast cancer drug Aromasin which shows it may be free of the osteoporosis side-effects seen in its competitors in the aromatase inhibitor class.
Meanwhile, Roche and Genentech presented impressive new data on their breast cancer treatment Herceptin. The data showed that when given in combination with standard chemotherapy, to patients with early stage breast cancer, Herceptin (trastuzumab) reduced the risk of the disease returning by over 50% compared to chemotherapy alone.
Herceptin is currently only approved for women in the last stages of cancer but, according to analysts, this new market could be worth an extra $250 million to Roche and Genentech.
