Posts tagged ‘Zelboraf’
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).
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.
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.