Posts tagged ‘Prostate Cancer’
Do you have a need to understand the fast moving prostate cancer market and its competitive dynamics? If so, please contact us as we offer a number of services in support of prostate cancer marketing and new products. The team at Icarus Consultants has in-depth knowledge of this therapeutic area.
Last week, Pieter Droppert wrote on Biotech Strategy Blog about what the impact of the European approval for abiraterone acetate (Zytiga®) may be on cabazitaxel (Jevtana®) sales.
Both are indicated in the post-docetaxel setting. Will physicians prescribe a convenient pill (abiraterone) as opposed to using another line of chemo (cabazitaxel)? You can read Pieter’s thoughts on Biotech Strategy Blog.
Meanwhile on Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church wrote an update on pharma social media. She reviewed the Zytiga healthcare professionals website and the many features that she liked.
In another post last week, Sally discussed some of the issues surrounding the drop in share price for Dendreon and possible reasons for poor sipuleucel-T (Provenge®) sales. She also discussed new research that shows the TMPRSS2:ERG gene may be a more useful marker than PSA in prostate cancer. You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Want to understand the prostate cancer market? Contact us.
The 2011 annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) ended in Washington DC today.
Some of the highlights of the meeting were written about on Pharma Strategy Blog and Biotech Strategy Blog, these include:
PIVOT (Prostate Cancer Intervention versus Observation Study)
The data from this study was presented in Tuesday’s plenary session by Dr Tim Wilt, a Professor at the University of Minnesota, and was to many attendees, the highlight of the meeting.
The trial results showed for the first time that radical prostatectomy (RP) is no better than watchful waiting in men with early stage prostate cancer using evidence based medicine.
This groundbreaking research is likely to have a major impact on urology practice in the United States.
Pieter Droppert wrote about the PIVOT results on Biotech Strategy Blog. Scott Hensley on NPR’s Health Blog, “Shots” references Pieter’s post, and has an interview with Dr Wilt that is also well worth reading.
Also presented at AUA in Tuesday’s plenary session were the results from:
Denosumab (Xgeva®) 147 phase III trial
This study looked at castrate resistant prostate cancer patients at high risk of development of bone metastasis.
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog discusses the results presented by Dr Matthew Smith at AUA. Denosumab was shown to increase bone metastasis-free survival and delayed time to first bone metastasis, but did not increase overall survival (OS).
Both Sally Church and Pieter Droppert also wrote additional blog posts from the meeting. On Biotech Strategy Blog, Pieter wrote about data that showed:
He also wrote about:
New Prostate Cancer products in development beyond the androgen axis
Some of the new products mentioned in Pieter’s post include alpharadin, XL-184 (cabozantinib), Prostvac-VF, BPX-101 and ipilimumab. You can read more on Biotech Strategy Blog.
Meanwhile on Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church continued one of her themes of how social media is impacting medical conferences by reviewing:
How AUA have embraced Social Media in 2011
Sally also recorded a video blog post (vlog) from AUA that highlighted some of the exciting developments in basic biology and how this may lead to new Prostate Cancer treatments in the future. Click here to watch this.
If you were unable to attend the meeting, Sally aggregated the #AUA2011 tweets.
Selecting what to write about on a blog is subjective, so the above posts are not intended to provide comprehensive meeting or conference coverage, only a few highlights of what was presented at the highly informative and educational AUA annual meeting.
If you are interested in a more comprehensive report on the Prostate Cancer Market and the emerging new products in development, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Icarus Consultants will be attending the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) that starts in Washington DC this weekend.
On Biotech Strategy Blog, Pieter Droppert has written about the independent satellite symposia he will be attending. These are not officially part of the AUA meeting, but associated with it.
One of the symposia is on managing skeletal-related events in patients with prostate cancer. In his blog post, Pieter discusses some of the unanswered questions around this topic such as the impact on Quality of Life (QoL) in patients with bone-metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC).
You can read more about which AUA satellite symposia Pieter will be attending and what information and insight he hopes to obtain from them on Biotech Strategy Blog.
This Friday sees the start of the 2011 annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) in Washington, DC. The meeting runs from May 14-19.
We expect the recent FDA approval of abiraterone acetate (Zytiga®) from Ortho Biotech (JNJ) to be hot news at the meeting as urologists seek to learn more about it’s use.
Icarus Consultants will be in our Nation’s Capital for AUA, so should you be interested in meeting up, please contact us.
Sally Church’s interview with Dr Charles Sawyers rated a “must read” by Forbes Health
May 5th, 2011
Daedalus
Sally Church invests a lot of her personal time in writing for Pharma Strategy Blog. With a focus on the science of new products and treatments in cancer and hematology, Sally willingly shares her passion, knowledge and expertise.
It is always a pleasure to receive endorsement from others. Matthew Herper from Forbes Health kindly highlighted Sally’s interview with Dr Charles Sawyers as a “must read.”
We agree. Dr Sawyers is one of the leading translational scientists in the United States who along with Dr Brian Druker and Dr Nick Lydon received the prestigious Lasker award for their work on imatinib (Gleevec/Glivec) in CML. Dr Sawyers is now working on prostate cancer, and in his interview with Sally, describes his latest work developing MDV3100 and ARN-509.
We unequivocally recommend reading Sally’s post on Pharma Strategy Blog, “Making a difference to the lives of cancer patients: An interview with Dr Charles Sawyers.”
Zytiga (abiraterone acetate) price will impact the Prostate Cancer market following FDA approval
April 29th, 2011
Daedalus
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog has written about the FDA approval yesterday of Ortho Biotech’s ($JNJ) abiraterone acetate, brand name Zytiga for the treatment of castration resistant prostate cancer in patients who have received prior chemotherapy with docetaxel.
The final data showed a 4.6 month increase in overall survival (OS) in these very sick patients in late stage disease. It is to be expected that the response will be significantly better in patients treated earlier.
As Sally states in her post, “it is good to see new treatment options emerge for the treatment of castrate resistant prostate cancer.”
Abiraterone treatment has been priced competitively by JNJ, with a treatment price of around $40K ($5,000 per month for a median treatment cycle of 8 months). As Sally notes “this is very fair.”
The commercial impact for sanofi-aventis is likely to be huge. It’s hard not to see elderly or frail patients preferring 4 pills a day compared to chemotherapy with a side-effect profile that is far from optimal. The price of abiraterone acetate (Zytiga) is lower than cabazitaxel (Jevtana), which was approved early last year. The market opportunity for Jevtana looks less promising now that it has competition.
Sally, in her insightful post on Pharma Strategy Blog, also notes a possible impact on sipuleucel-T (Provenge) from Dendreon, which is $93K for three infusions. It’s hard not to see some off-label usage from urologists given that phase III trials for use of abiraterone in the pre-chemotherapy setting are already enrolled.
The prostate cancer market is currently a very dynamic and competitive one. With more new drugs on the horizon that may potentially be improvements on abiraterone acetate e.g. MDV3100 and ARN-509, it’s an exciting market to watch.
Sally Church has a number of posts on Pharma Strategy Blog that discuss the science and pharma marketing strategy for prostate cancer new products.
As many of you know, Sally Church attended the recent European Association of Urology Congress in Vienna.
In the first video blog post that she’s ever done on Pharma Strategy Blog, she shares her impressions of the meeting and the changing landscape in advanced prostate cancer. One of the key new product approvals expected this year is for abiraterone.
We love the “BBC News” style graphics of her video blog, and look forward to hearing from Sally throughout the course of the year as she attends other conferences.
You can now watch Sally on her own YouTube channel. Will we see “Sally Church reporting live for Pharma Strategy Blog”?
Many European doctors enjoy a glass of good wine, so Bertrand Tombal’s metaphor that 2010 was a great year for advanced prostate cancer drugs was well received at the recent European Association of Urology Congress in Vienna.
Sally Church attended the meeting, and shared her thoughts on “the changing face of advanced prostate cancer” in a post on Pharma Strategy Blog.
According to Sally, one of the highlights of the meeting was the plenary presentation by Professor Johann de Bono of the Royal Marsden in the UK who discussed the new products that now exist or will soon be available for advanced prostate cancer.
Professor de Bono described how we now know more about Prostate Cancer and the fact that androgen receptor signaling remains active in advanced prostate cancer. Hormone therapy now works after chemotherapy, so the use of the term metastatic hormone refractory mHRPC is no longer valid.
He predicted that the we can expect the prostate cancer field to change in the next few years as we learn more about the molecular aspects of the disease and are better able to stratify patients.
With new products such as abiraterone, MDV3100 on the horizon and recent approvals for cabazitaxel, sipuleucel-T, multiple lines of treatment will be available to patients. The challenge according to Professor de Bono will be how to sequence them.
Further news on new product development in prostate cancer can be expected at AUA, ASCO and ESMO. With approval for abiraterone expected later this year, 2011 may be a Grand Cru year too! You can keep track of the latest developments in this market on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog will be providing live coverage of the annual European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress that starts in Vienna this weekend.
If you can’t join Sally at the meeting for a slice of schwarzwälder kirschtorte, then you can experience the meeting virtually as Sally aggregates all the live tweets, and contributes her own.
There are a lot of new products in the prostate cancer market. With new treatment options such as Dendreon’s sipuleucel-T, sanofi-aventis’ cabizatexel and JNJ’s abiraterone expected in the not too distant future, the meeting is bound to be interesting. We can also expect the latest news about new product development in bladder and renal cancer.
The Cover it Live widget on Sally’s blog will be aggregating all the tweets that use the conference hashtag #EAU11, so if you are unable to be in Vienna, you can follow what’s happening by clicking here.
Photo Werner Kunz via flickr
Icarus Consultants will be at the forthcoming European Urology Association annual meeting in Vienna, Austria from March 18-22, 2011.
If you are going to be in Vienna and would be interested in meeting up for Kaffee Und Kuchen, please contact us.
Incidentally, our favorite is a slice of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest gateau).