Posts tagged ‘Sipuleucel-T’
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 marketing strategy consultants, it’s fascinating to watch the dynamics of a pharmaceutical market in rapid evolution.
With three new therapies for prostate cancer approved last year (cabazitaxel, denosumab, sipuleucel-T) and the approval of abiraterone acetate expected this month, the prostate cancer market is a fast changing one.
This is really good news for patients, and for a disease that effects 1 in 6 men in the United States, and is the most common non-skin cancer.
Pieter Droppert on Biotech Strategy Blog has some commentary from the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) on additional new products in development that may change the landscape of this disease further.
You can read more about this on Biotech Strategy Blog.
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.