Posts tagged ‘vemurafenib’
Last week the hot news was the anticipated FDA approval of vemurafenib (Zelboraf™) in metastatic melanoma for patients with BRAF V600E mutations.
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog has written extensively about new products in development for metastatic melanoma. As Sally notes in her recent blog post discussing the Zelboraf™ approval:
“the good news is that oncologists now have two new agents for treatment in 2011, which is very much a grand cru year for melanoma.”
A little known fact is that Sally is a former finalist in the UK Daily Telegraph newspaper’s wine taster of the year competition, so it is perhaps not surprising to see some wine references in her writing.
If you are interested in the price of Zelboraf™ – you can find it on Pharma Strategy Blog where Sally analyses the cost of a course of treatment and compares this to the price for ipilimumab.
Pieter Droppert’s write-up of the 2011 ASCO annual meeting plenary data on metastatic melanoma was recently published in the august issue of Pharmacy Today.
At ASCO this year, there was a lot of interest in BRAF mutated melanoma, with data being presented in the plenary session on vemurafenib (PLX4032) and ipilimumab.
However, as Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog points out, 40% of all new cancer cases are due to non-melanoma skin cancer, with over one million diagnoses each year in the US.
Sally discusses research published in the AACR journal Cancer Research by Mei Ming and colleagues from the University of Chicago on how the tumor suppressor gene phosphatase and tensin homolog deleted from chromosome ten (PTEN) regulates UVB-induced DNA damage.
The research shows that PTEN has a key role to play in human skin cancer formation and progression with low levels of PTEN associated with slower rates of DNA repair after UVB radiation damage.
As Sally notes on her blog, “a greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms underpinning non-melanoma skin cancer potentially means that chemoprevention strategies can be developed down the road.”
You can read more about the role PTEN plays in non-melanoma skin cancer on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Photo Credit: Nimesh Madhaven
This Friday sees the start of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. The meeting runs from June 3-7.
On Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church shares her thoughts on what she expects to be hot news at ASCO this year.
In her ASCO11 video preview Sally discusses clinical trial presentations in ovarian cancer, metastatic melanoma and soft tissue sarcoma. You can watch Sally’s video below and read more on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Icarus Consultants will be attending ASCO (along with 30,000 others), so if you are interested in meeting up, please contact us.