Looking beyond the spin of Big Pharma PR. But encouraging gossip. Come in and confide, you know you want to! “I’ll publish right or wrong. Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
Email: jackfriday2011(at)hotmail.co.uk
Let there be no mistake it is very important that companies developing new medicine engage in cancer as a target too. A lot of cancers remain uncurable yet. Statistics however prove that the attrition rate of new cancer medicine is above 90%. Why is that? One reason is that not all targets for new medicine development have been validated. Once you understand the mechanism of action in subsets of cells causing cancer you might be able to find a way of either stimulating or blocking that mechanism. If you do not, which is frequently the case you must get very lucky to have an effect. On top of that the effects of a new cancer medicine are tested on animal models first. The analysis of these animal models are standard performed on whole tumor tissue. Whereas the new medicine is often targeted at very specific cells in that tumor. This will not lead to the right conclusion from the analysis. E.g. If the target for the medicine is the vascualr bed; which makes up only 5 % of the whole tumor tissue, and the whole tumor is being analysed you can imagine that the effects on the cells of the vascualr bed are "snowed under" in the endresult of the anlysis; thus leading to the wrong conclusions. Conclusion: if the current ways of developing new medicine to fight cancer remain unchanged than it is almost impossible to "replenish revenues".
Forbes' Matt Herper explains Pfizer's latest ambition.
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Let there be no mistake it is very important that companies developing new medicine engage in cancer as a target too. A lot of cancers remain uncurable yet. Statistics however prove that the attrition rate of new cancer medicine is above 90%. Why is that? One reason is that not all targets for new medicine development have been validated. Once you understand the mechanism of action in subsets of cells causing cancer you might be able to find a way of either stimulating or blocking that mechanism. If you do not, which is frequently the case you must get very lucky to have an effect. On top of that the effects of a new cancer medicine are tested on animal models first. The analysis of these animal models are standard performed on whole tumor tissue. Whereas the new medicine is often targeted at very specific cells in that tumor. This will not lead to the right conclusion from the analysis. E.g. If the target for the medicine is the vascualr bed; which makes up only 5 % of the whole tumor tissue, and the whole tumor is being analysed you can imagine that the effects on the cells of the vascualr bed are "snowed under" in the endresult of the anlysis; thus leading to the wrong conclusions.
Conclusion: if the current ways of developing new medicine to fight cancer remain unchanged than it is almost impossible to "replenish revenues".
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