Posts tagged ‘Pharma Business Strategy’
This weeks sees the start of the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Thousands of pharma/biotech investors, analysts, venture capitalists and company executives will meet to pitch, showcase their companies and make deals. A lot of people seemed to be on the same “VC express” flight from the East Coast.
Although many of the corporate presentations will be webcast over the next few days, it is expected that a lot of the news and commentary will be shared on twitter.
We are aggregating the #JPM12 tweets. If you are unable to be in San Francisco, you can follow the conversation below:
Future advances in cancer drug development may come from targeting cancer metabolism and the pathways associated with this.
Image Source: Tak W Mak, Stockholm EMCC 2011
That was one of the key messages of Tak Wah Mak (Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto) in his plenary presentation at the recent ESMO/ECCO multidisciplinary cancer congress in Stockholm.
An examples of this is the PI3-Kinase RAS axis that also inhibits glycolysis.
Sally Church in today’s post on Pharma Strategy Blog picks up on this, and how “understanding the process of tumorigenesis, ie tumour formation and growth, is critical to figuring out how to stop it.”
She discusses recent research from MD Anderson Cancer Center on Pyruvate Kinase M2 (PKM2) that is highly expressed in human cancer.
PKM2 plays an important role in glycolysis (Warburg effect) but also has a non-metabolic effect on tumor formation and growth.
The MD Anderson researchers showed how epidermal growth factor (EGFR) activation led to translocation of PKM2, but not PKM1.
You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog about the significance of these findings and how this might lead to new biomarkers and treatment approaches.
Targeting Tumor Metabolism is one of the plenary sessions at the forthcoming AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics Congress in San Francisco.
Richard Steinman from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in “The Oncologist” (the journal of the Society of Translational Oncology), comments on the importance of the noncancerous cells in tumors (the stroma):
“The stroma, including fibroblasts, adipocytes, endothelial cells, and immune cells, had been demonstrated to provide critical metabolites to cancer cells and engages in tumor-promoting crosstalk with cancer cells.”
PET scan of enzyme MAO-B Image Source: NIH
Recent research has shown the ability to image metabolic markers of tumor activity. On Biotech Strategy Blog, Pieter Droppert writes about a metabolic marker of malignant glioma cells, 5-ALA (5-Amino-Levulinic-Acid) and how this may help glioblastoma surgery.
Meanwhile on Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church discusses the use of folate receptor alpha fluorescence imaging in ovarian cancer.
Imaging of metabolic markers may assist in the identification and targeting of critical mediators of cancer-stromal crosstalk. This is an interesting area to watch.
The forthcoming AACR-NCI-EORTC conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics has a plenary session on “Targeting the Tumor Stroma Interaction.“