Pharma Strategy Blog

Following on from my preview of the 2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, I am now working through updates on some of the hot topics.

I’m delighted to announce The Chemical & Engineering News blog ‘The Haystack’, have published my second guest post on advances in metastatic melanoma.

This is a devastating disease that has seen very few advances over the last decade since the approval of dacarbazine (DTIC) until last year when the FDA approved two new therapies in vemurafenib (Zelboraf) for patients with the BRAFV600E mutation and ipilumumab (Yervoy), an immunotherapy that targets CTLA4.

Since then, we’ve realised that the inevitable happens – patients tumours become resistant to single agent TKI therapy because adaptive resistance pathways are activated and cross-talk with the MAPK kinase pathway often occurs.  The question of how we can improve on the encouraging results seen so far was explored in new trials in Chicago?

For those of you interested, you read my summary on The Haystack about the new developments in metastatic melanoma from ASCO, which includes dabrafenib, trametinib, anti-PD-1 and others.

For those who missed it, I also wrote a guest post about the ASCO 2012 data on overcoming resistance in non-small cell lung cancer.

May I take this opportunity to wish all my American readers a very enjoyable July 4th Independence Day weekend!