Posts tagged ‘Sanofi-Aventis’
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.
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.
Sanofi's iniparib misses primary endpoints in newly diagnosed triple negative breast cancer
January 28th, 2011
Daedalus
Published by Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog
BREAKING NEWS
Sanofi-aventis have just announced :
“A randomized Phase III trial evaluating BSI-201 (iniparib*) in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) did not meet the pre-specified criteria for significance for co-primary endpoints of overall survival and progression-free survival.”
Iniparib was thought to offer the best chance of success with PARP inhibitors because the others have so far been shown to be
- more potent
- more challenging to combine given the toxicities involved.
Clearly it is a fine line between potency and toxicities with this particular class.
Click here to read the full post on Pharma Strategy Blog
Published by Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog
Published by Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog