Posts tagged ‘Yervoy’
Pharmacy Today publishes Women's Health and Melanoma articles by Pieter Droppert
August 26th, 2011
Daedalus
The August 2011 issue of Pharmacy Today (the monthly magazine of the American Pharmacists Association) contains two articles written by Pieter Droppert.
In an update on what’s happened in women’s health over the past year, Pieter highlights the Institute of Medicine report on Women’s Health Research. A key finding of this report is that medical research has neglected the needs of women with the exception of those associated with reproduction.
Another topic covered in the update on Women’s Health was the clinical trial results from use of the aromatase inhibitor exemestane as a chemo-preventative agent. Exemestane use reduced the risk of invasive breast cancer by 65% compared to placebo.
Pieter also reported on news from ASCO 2011, and how new drugs such as ipilimumab (YERVOY™) and vemurafenib (Zelboraf™) offer hope to patients with metastatic melanoma.
You can read both articles on the Pharmacy Today website (free online access).
Earlier this summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Oncology Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) announced a positive decision for Seattle Genetics’ Adcetris™ (brentuximab vedotin) in Hodgkin Lymphoma (HL) and Analplastic Large Cell Lymphoma (ALCL).
As Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog reported earlier this week, Seattle Genetics has just received fast track approval from the FDA for Adcetris™, a CD30-directed antibody drug-conjugate.
Using the company announced price of $13,500 per dose, Sally in her blog post analyzed the clinical trial data and treatment regimens to come up with a likely cost for a course of treatment in the range of $94,500 – $121,500.
Sally goes on to note that the “overall treatment cost will therefore be typically less than the $120K cost of treatment for BMS’s ipilimumab (Yervoy) in metastatic melanoma.”
The clinical data for Adcetris™ is impressive, and patients will most certainly benefit from the availability of this new treatment. Adcetris™ is the first antibody drug conjugate (ADC) technology to come to market.
You can read more about Sally’s analysis of the Adcetris™ price and other ADC products in the pipeline such as Roche’s T-DM1 on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Source: NIH
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog has published a thought-provoking piece that discusses why targeted and focused new therapies will lead to higher rather than lower costs of drug development.
Cost drivers include the need to develop biomarkers, undertake more translational medicine and the potential use of combination therapies.
Sally highlights the cost of recently approved drugs such as Yervoy, Adcetris and Zelboraf as examples of how costs are increasing, not decreasing.
Contrary to the opinion of Harpal Kumar, CEO of Cancer Research UK, Sally believes that:
“specialized treatment based on the underlying biology will ultimately cost more, not less, in the long run in terms of research and development, diagnostics/biomarkers and treatment costs of every smaller subsets.”
Is this sustainable in the long-run? Industry, government and payors have yet to tackle this issue. It’s a problem that is not going away.
You should read Sally’s thought provoking op-ed on “the spiraling costs of cancer research and treatment” on Pharma Strategy Blog.