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ASCO 2013 Highlights Part 2

It’s that time of the year when the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) hurtles around with alarming speed out of nowhere and everyone in Pharmaland goes, “ASCO, what already? Is it really June?!” Suddenly the month becomes the focus for many frantic hives of activity.

Immunotherapy

The last two years have seen some unprecedented changes in new therapies emerging to treat several different tumour types, both liquid and solid. One of the new trends that has begun to emerge is the new class of immunotherapy agents called checkpoint regulator inhibitors. These include:

CTLA-4 (ipilimumab)
PD-1 (nivolumab and lambrolizumab)
PD-L1 (RG7446)
OXO-40 inhibitors (more about those in another post).

This year at ASCO brings forth a lot of new data from the four compounds mentioned. In the video preview we have also attempted to explain how these antibodies work and why they are an important development beyond melanoma. There are data in several tumour types including melanoma, RCC and head & neck cancer at Chicago. In the recent thought leader interview with Dr Robert Motzer (MSKCC), he mentioned PD-1 as a hot topic to watch out for in renal cancer. However, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the lung cancer data, which has the potential to be really stunning.

In this year’s ASCO video preview, we have included some graphics and an MOA video explaining how these immunotherapies are thought to work. Check it out below!

CLL

Another area that I’ve been watching for a while is chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which has languished a little in the shadow of it’s CML cousin. Not for long though!

There are a lot of exciting developments here beyond Pharmacyclics BTK inhibitor, ibrutinib. These include new CD-20 antibodies such as Roche’s GA-101 (obinutuzumab) and SYK inhibitors (whatever happened to fostamatinib, one of the hematology highlights of the 2010 ASCO?) where Gilead are now developing an early compound, potentially for combining with their PI3K-delta inhibitor, CAL-101, now known as idelalisib.

In addition, Infinity also have a PI3K-delta inhibitor, although they are further behind in development. We don’t know yet whether greater in vivo potency will translate to the clinic or whether also targeting gamma will add to the efficacy or introduce off-target kinase toxicities. Either way, it’s good to see so many targets and exciting new agents being explored for this disease.

Breast and Lung Cancers

On the solid tumour front, I was delighted to see new data in HER2+ breast cancer and ALK+ lung cancer. Interestingly, in both of these cancers, Pfizer and Novartis in particular are making inroads with a number of compounds including everolimus (Afinitor), palbociclib (PD-0332991) a selective inhibitor of cyclin dependent kinases (CDK) 4 and 6, LDK378 and PF-05280014, a trastuzumab biosimilar.

Pancreatic Cancer

My final topic that has some interesting developments is pancreatic cancer. Since the phase III Abraxane data from the MPACT study was presented at ASCO GI, Celgene have filed with the FDA and received Priority review, with a PDUFA date of September 21st. An update is expected at ASCO, along with tumour marker data and prognostic biomarker data. Threshold are presenting their phase III study design for TH-302 in the Trials in Progress section, but given the standard of care may well have changed by the time the data is mature, this may well be a day late and dollar short.

All in all, a good year can be expected for new data emerging at this year’s ASCO.

You can learn more about these topics, including insights on how PD-1 and PD-L1 immunotherapies work from the video highlights by clicking on the image below:

My ASCO preview video was freely available for several months but is now part of Biotech Strategy Blog Premium Content.

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Aggregating the 2012 ASCO tweets

By MaverickNY on June 1, 2012

It’s that time of the year – the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference in Chicago begins in earnest with Friday being the main travel day for many people before they hit the ground running for the poster sessions this afternoon.

This year, in addition to insights and analysis here on PSB, I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be writing some posts for the Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) blog, The Haystack after the meeting (links to follow).

For me, one of the key themes emerging from the abstracts is overcoming drug resistance – we know that single agent targeted therapies are not enough, the question is what are the logical combinations needed to shutdown the pathways more comprehensively to improve outcomes. Stay tuned for more on this important topic!

For those of you in town for ASCO, there’s an unofficial Tweetup this evening organized by Adam Feuerstein of The Street and others for anyone interested in joining a mix of people to natter about the hot topics over a beer – check out the details here.

As usual, the aggregated tweets from the event under the #ASCO12 hashtag are posted in the widget below for those who are interested in following along remotely. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the Comments below the post and I’ll do my best to answer them:

Ribonucleases (RNase) what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

By MaverickNY on April 30, 2012

At the recent American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting several interesting young scientists and physicians either in the poster halls or in various scientific sessions. It seemed a great idea to encourage some of them to contribute some guess blog posts here on PSB.

Dr Laura Strong, Photo courtesy of Pieter Droppert, Biotech Strategy Blog

Amongst the people I met was Dr Laura Strong, President and COO of Quintessence Biosciences.

One of the joys of social media is that sometimes you can get to know people a little from online interactions before you actually meet them in real life, making it much easier to walk up and introduce yourself as a ‘warm’ rather than ‘cold’ contact from a conversational standpoint. I’ve been following Laura (@scientre) for a while on Twitter and was keen to learn more about what her early stage biotech company does.

Quintessence Biosciences is, according to it’s website, “a biopharmaceutical company focused on development of novel protein-based therapeutics as anti-cancer agents. The Company’s products are based on the EVade™ Ribonuclease Technology which allows for the engineering of human proteins (ribonucleases) for the treatment of human diseases.”

Essentially, in plain English, this means that “The EVade™ Ribonucleases degrade ribonucleic acids (RNA), resulting in inhibition of protein synthesis and cell death.”

Source: Quintessence Biosciences

Laura was presenting a very interesting poster at the meeting, so I asked her if she was interested in writing a guest post about their work on RNases. She has most kindly agreed, so today and tomorrow we’re running a two-part mini series from Laura on RNases based on Quintessence’s work. For those interested in background research, you can check out more about the company here and also Laura’s blog, The Next Element.

RNases: From Concept to Clinic

At this year’s AACR Annual Meeting, I presented results from in vitro screening of combinations of our clinical stage ribonuclease (RNase). The theme of the meeting, Accelerating Science: Concept to Clinic, captures the serendipitous discovery that started on this course and subsequent development of this innovative and differentiated class of drugs.

Is RNA a good therapeutic target?

RNA has been a validated drug target for decades – from the discovery that various classes of antibiotics target ribosomal RNA to the more recent approaches using modified oligonucleotides to target specific RNA sequences. Vitravene is an oligonucleotide designed to binds a critical cytomegalovirus (CMV) messenger RNA that was approved by the FDA to treat CMV retinitis in immunocompromised patients. Recently a New Drug Application (NDA) was recently filed for another oligonucleotide drug, Kynamro (mipomersen sodium) that targets apolipoprotein-B to treat severe forms of familial hypercholesterolemia. These drugs have another feature in common: they do not target cancer.

In cancer drug development, the development of receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) provides a potential roadmap for successful development of RNA-based therapies. While the early approved drugs, such as imatinib (targets bcr-abl to treat Philadelphia positive Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML)), provided significant benefit to patients, resistance via mutation in the ATP-binding pocket of the kinase domain has become a persistent problem in TKI therapy. This situation has prompted the development of second generation drugs (e.g. dasatinib and nilotinib for CML).

Another important lesson from TKI drug development is the clinical impact of targeting multiple and complementary aberrant signaling pathways. Even if the activity of one component of a pathway is blocked, there are often others that can compensate for the loss. In practice, this has led to development of pan-kinase inhibitors and to combining drugs in clinical trials based on the overlap of pathways. These results suggest that a single target approach may not have enough impact in targeting the RNA in cancer cells.

How do you go after multiple RNA targets?

One approach to target multiple RNA sequences inside a cell is to deliver multiple RNA drugs, such as modified oligonucleotides. Alnylam has taken this approach with their early clinical drug ALN-VSP. The drug uses small interfering RNA (siRNA), which are relatively short (1–22 base pair) RNA duplexes that inhibit messenger RNA once inside cells. In the case of ALN-VSP, two types of siRNA are included in a lipid nanoparticle. ALN-VSP targets two genes involved in liver cancer: kinesin spindle protein and vascular endothelial growth factor. The drug has completed a Phase I dose escalation study.

An alternative approach to attack multiple pieces of RNA in cancer cells is to use a human protein whose function is to degrade RNA, a ribonuclease (RNase). While this alternative may not be immediately obvious, serendipity played a role in bringing this concept to the clinic. In the late 1980s, frog egg extracts were screened for in vitro anti-cancer activity with positive results. The active component turned out to be a frog RNase that is part of the RNase A family.

Professor Ronald Raines at the University of Wisconsin made the connection that bovine RNase A, the prototypical family member, was not toxic to cancer cells and identified a major difference between the frog and bovine RNases. The bovine RNase A binds very tightly to the ribonuclease inhibitor protein found in the cytosol of human cells while the frog RNase does not. Using this information, a variety of bovine RNase A variants were produced with diminished binding to the inhibitor and these RNases were cytotoxic to cancer cells in vitro.

Using the closest human homolog, human RNase I, we first tested the concept of whether certain RNase variants may have anti-tumor activity in preclinical cancer models in mice. Forty human RNase I variants were produced based on data from a crystal structure data of the bound RNase and inhibitor and then tested in xenograft models. The RNases showed a range of activity, highlighting that the activity of the RNase is based on evasion of ribonuclease inhibitor but there are other factors, such as internalization and pharmacokinetics that also contribute to efficacy.

QBI–139

We selected QBI–139 as our lead candidate because the drug had the greatest activity across the most tumor types, including breast, colorectal, non-small cell lung, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers. QBI–139 maintains 95% sequence identity to the human RNase I. The efficacy of QBI–139 was similar to chemotherapies and targeted agents when tested in preclinical models. We also did not see the common toxicities associated with chemotherapy (e.g. myelosuppression, alopecia, etc.) in the efficacy models.

The example shown is a xenograft model of prostate cancer (DU145) comparing QBI–139 to the standard of care agent docetaxel as well as the frog RNase. On a once weekly schedule, QBI–139 provides equivalent efficacy as the other two agents with less toxicity. At this dose, QBI–139 did not cause death (as in the docetaxel arm) or weight loss (as in the frog RNase treatment arm).

Do check back PSB tomorrow for the second part of Laura’s synopsis on RNases, which discusses the clinical aspects and where Quintessence are going with this interesting and novel concept.

A new fusion gene target in a rare soft tissue sarcoma

By MaverickNY on February 14, 2012

Every now and then my eye is caught by reports of new fusion genes being found in different cancers. Often these descriptions involve researchers across multiple laboratories due to the rarity of the target. Following a discussion on Twitter yesterday, a friend sent me the link to this interesting paper published in Science Translational Medicine. Naturally, one of the first things that came to mind was ‘is the identified target druggable?’

Source: wikipedia micrograph of epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (from the liver)

Tanas et al., (2011) used deep gene sequencing and conventional cytogenetics to identify two genes involved in chromosomal translocation in epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE), a rare vascular sarcoma that arises out of endothelial cells, namely:

WWTR1, WW domain-containing transcription regulator 1 (3q25) and
CAMTA1, calmodulin-binding transcription activator 1 (1p36).

The researchers noted that:

“CAMTA1 encodes a transcription factor that is found in all multi- cellular organisms tested and is evolutionarily conserved from Arabidopsis to humans.”

What is its function?

“Little is known about the protein’s function in mammalian cells, but in humans, the gene is expressed almost exclusively within the brain and has been implicated in memory because high amounts of CAMTA1 mRNA have been identified in memory-related regions.”

Now, there are a couple of other things to note:

Not much is known about EHE, as the sarcoma was only described recently by Weiss and Goldblum (2008) in Enzinger and Weiss’s Soft Tissue Tumors. They appear to affect both sexes equally and are not age dependent, appearing in soft tissue, bone and visceral organs such as the liver and lungs.
There are no current treatment options for EHE, other than surgical removal.
Diagnosis of EHE is currently challenging and requires careful histological examination.

The paper is well worth reading for those interested in the challenges of fusion gene isolation, but what particularly struck me was the prevalence of the translocation in EHE compared with other sarcomas – it appears to be very distinctly different, since none of the others evaluated (nearly 30 of them, was found to have the translocation).

The presence of the fusion gene in EHE but not the other sarcomas strongly suggests a role in tumorigenesis, i.e. it’s an oncogene rather than a tumor suppressor gene.

“We anticipate that understanding the mechanism of WWTR1/CAMTA1 oncogenesis will be instrumental toward developing targeted therapy for EHE, for which none currently exists.”

There are some positive things that emerge from this research. In some ways, identification of the fusion gene in EHE may well change diagnosis and treatment options in the future for patients with the disease, much in the same way that imatinib helped to redefine the diagnosis and treatment of another rare sarcoma, gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST) in 2002. Hope, as they say, is always just around the corner.

If any scientists or pharma people following this blog have something in their pipeline that may target the WWTR1/CAMTA1 fusion gene, then please let me know – it would be useful if we could crowdsource potential therapies aimed at oncogenes actively involved in tumorigenesis of rare cancers.

{UPDATE: Bruce Shriver from the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative, patient support group since shared this link via Twitter on the background to the disease in plain English and further development of the fusion gene research – please check it out! }

References:

Tanas, M., Sboner, A., Oliveira, A., Erickson-Johnson, M., Hespelt, J., Hanwright, P., Flanagan, J., Luo, Y., Fenwick, K., Natrajan, R., Mitsopoulos, C., Zvelebil, M., Hoch, B., Weiss, S., Debiec-Rychter, M., Sciot, R., West, R., Lazar, A., Ashworth, A., Reis-Filho, J., Lord, C., Gerstein, M., Rubin, M., & Rubin, B. (2011). Identification of a Disease-Defining Gene Fusion in Epithelioid Hemangioendothelioma Science Translational Medicine, 3 (98), 98-98 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002409

Follow the American Society of Hematology ASH conversations!

By MaverickNY on December 10, 2011

It doesn’t seem a full year since the last American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting took place, time has certainly flown by!

For those interested, I posted a review what I think will be hot topics at this meeting

In the meantime, to enable easy reading of the tweets and discussions here in San Diego for those both attending and following remotely, I’m aggregating the tweets around the official hashtag, #ASH11.

You can follow the conversations over the weekend through Tuesday in the widget below:

If you have any questions please do add them in the comments below or feel free to tweet me, @maverickny on Twitter.

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Follow the conversation from 2011 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

By MaverickNY on December 6, 2011

Greetings from the frigid cold of Texas Hill Country! It’s 38F and a little nippy here at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), brrrr! Later this morning, I will be recording my premeeting video but the outdoor Riverwalk filming has been sadly cancelled due to the inclement weather. However, I will post a synopsis of my hot topics and main highlights that I plan to be covering at this event.

In the meantime, for those of you following remotely, you can follow the conversations and join in the discussion around progress in breast cancer on Twitter using the hashtag #SABCS. To make it easy to read all the tweets, you can use the widget below to see what’s going on – tweets will start in earnest this afternoon with the main sessions.

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=1444fee034" >SABCS 2011</a>

Social media at ECCO, ESMO, EMCC Stockholm 2011

By MaverickNY on September 22, 2011

Hopefully, by the time y’all read this we have arrived here we are in Stockholm after a nighmarish week with Continental and United messing up big time with flights booked six months ago. Sometimes big corporations really fail to understand the importance of communication and customer loyalty. Eventually, it is only when there is competition, they stop and wonder why many people used the Law of Two Feet and walked. Maybe that is a subconscious metaphor for Big Pharma 🙂

Anyway, enough of all that. Let’s take a look at some of the social media tools being used at the ECCO conference this week as it seems to be an increasing trend for conference organisers to incorporate social media into their event. They have taken several forms, including downloadable apps for the schedule, subscription to talks and webcasts on iTunes or encouraging open dialogue on Twitter and Facebook amongst participants.

Two excellent examples I’ve seen this year, in terms of well organised and integrated social media tools, have been the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and American Urological Association (AUA). While the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) inevitably gets the largest volume of tweets by dint of its sheer size, the smaller organisations have perhaps been more aggressive and creative in developing and utilising the tools more effectively for their members.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how things have progressed in Europe at the ECCO meeting, having had a very positive experience with planning most of my schedule on their new app. You can browse the sessions by day or type and add them easily to your calendar in local time in Stockholm. They appear in my calendar as ET but adjusted for the time zone. That’s a very nice touch many forget about and so the schedule goes wonky if you download it one time zone and attend the sessions in another! It looks like that will not be a problem with this app. Excellent!

Let’s take a look at what I could find in the ECCO program.

Social Media tools at ECCO

As mentioned yesterday, the official hashtag for Twitter is #emcc2011 and you can also follow the ECCO organisation on:

They also have some slick apps accessible by links or QR codes as preferred, to enable you to search and plan your schedule from the program:

Apple iPhone/iPad
Android phones

Tweets will most likely gather steam on Friday with the corporate symposia kicking off, as Thursday was the travel day for many.

Meanwhile, for those interested in following the conversations, as usual, we’re curating all the conference tweets below.

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What’s hot at ECCO, ESMO, EMCC in Stockholm 2011?

By MaverickNY on September 21, 2011

After a wild day yesterday once we realised Continental had mysteriously and unaccountably changed our flights to Stockholm from Weds to Weds to Thurs to Tues, it seems that Cinderella will be going to the ball after all.

European Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference (EMCC) here we come, whew!

There are a couple of sessions I’m particularly looking forward to this year:

Presidential Symposium on Sat 25th with talks from some of the leading lights in translational research:
- Tak Mak (U Toronto) on metabolism and cancer
- Jose Baselga (MGH) on the challenges of personalised medicine
- Gordon Mills (MDACC) on the future of personalised medicine

Various abstract highlights include:
- Update on phase II ERIVANCE data for the Hedgehog inhibitor, vismodegib, in basal cell carcinoma (see phase I data from AACR)
- Biomarkers, including VEGF-A in the bevacizumab trials and an update on KRAS
- Phase II T-DM1 (trastuzumab emtansine) data in breast cancer
- Reversing drug resistance in breast cancer (Mon 27th)
- Updated data from the phase I and III (BRIM3) studies of vemurafenib (Zelboraf) in BRAF V600E-mutation positive metastatic melanoma (will be interesting to see how this compares to the ASCO data
- Update on therapies in prostate cancer, including new phase III Alpharadin data (see Biotech Strategy Blog)

Scientific symposia on PARP inhibitors and PI3K inhibitors (both on Tues 28th). I’m gutted these two important sessions clash, as they are both key events I’d love to attend 🙁

All in all, it promises to be a fun and interesting meeting. For those interested, here’s the link to the full details of the EMCC programme.

Social media comes to ECCO

The official Twitter hashtag of the meeting is #emcc2011, a bit long I know, and I would much rather have the shorter, more descriptive and well known #ECCO or #ESMO, but it is a three organisation event afterall, with ECCO, ESMO and ESTRO all involved. You can also follow the EMCC conference organisers on Twitter (@EuropeanCancer).

This inevitably creates branding issues given it seems everyone in the industry has been seemingly asking me over the last two weeks if I’m going to ECCO or ESMO in equal measures! None outside of Twitter have mentioned EMCC at all. Ah well.

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iPad apps for science and medicine

By MaverickNY on August 30, 2011

One of the nicest things about about going to scientific meetings is that you get to meet interesting people. Instead of swapping cards and going about your way, in the modern world social media allows you to stay in touch more frequently personally while sharing cancer and scientific information over time. The discussions can be very insightful and enriching.

Two recent PhDs from MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC), Drs Angela Alexander and Jeannine Garnett are two of those research scientists I met while at cancer meetings and now keep in touch with – congratulations on your well earned doctorates this summer, ladies!

Angela recently started a nice blog The Cancer Geek and posted an extensive review of how she uses her iPad during the day, including a summary of some of her favourite apps. Check it out, it’s well worth reading!

Funnily enough, I use many of the same apps and a few different ones too. Not surprisingly, our workflow is a little different, given the diversity of things we’re both involved with. Since there’s no active bench research here at Icarus, there’s no need to order supplies. However, I thought for fun it would be a idea to take a leaf out of Angela’s book and take look at what’s on my iPad and how I use it. Here’s my home screen:

After much trial and error, I decided to keep the top most used apps on the main screen (they do change over time with usage and circumstances eg the ESPN Fantasy Football app disappears when the season is over) and organise all the other less used ones into folders in a library screen. On the other two screens I dragged and dropped things into folders such as tools, productivity, books, audio etc and use Search on the home screen to find things quickly like this:

This is much more productive than scrolling through looking for the app you need in a multitude of folders. The app usually comes up in the list after 2-3 letters are typed. Some basic caveats – at home or in the office the iPad is mainly used as a consumption devise to browse (on Safari or Atomic), read (iBooks, Goodreader, AACR Journals), check RSS and blog feeds (BW RSS, Feedly, Reeder), see what hot in Twitter (Echofon and Flipboard) or listen (iPod or Spotify for music, Science podcasts, AACR Webcasts app, Instacast for podcasts such as one of my favourites, MacPowerUsers).

The reason for focus on consumption over creation is that the desktop and laptop are much more powerful and heavy duty for content creation. However, there are some cool tools for capturing drawings and scribbles such as Penultimate and Listary, which is excellent for syncing a quick To-Do list between the iPad and iPhone.

On the road though, the iPad becomes a very nifty and efficient creation tool that fits my workflow at scientific congresses nicely. Yes, I have taken just the iPad to conferences and left the laptop behind without much difficulty. That was liberating!

There are some nifty productivity To Do apps out there such as Things and OmniFocus (I prefer the latter) in addition to password security, which I highly recommend in case your iPad goes missing – 1Password is my personal favourite.

One important point to note – I truly detest the shackles of Microsoft Office and have never been a big fan of the bloatware it has become. Years ago, while doing my PhD, the Physiology unit started migrating from WordPerfect, with its fast keyboard shortcuts and better graphic integration tools, to Word. The constant fiddling with autochanges to formatting, size and scaling drove me potty then and I still scowl if I have to use any of the apps with the exception of Excel, although the simplicity of Lotus 1-2-3 and its macros and keyboard slashkeys is a happy memory to this day.

PC and Windows users are very much stuck in the world of files organised into folders, but many Mac tools and the iPad in particular don’t work this way, so the thinking behind it is rather different. Think cloud apps and sync through Dropbox or searching for things based on Tagging, much in the same way that other apps such as Gmail, various text editors and Evernote work. This is the way of the future for many and is a much more efficient way to find and store data.

With this in mind, most of my writing (and I do a lot of it as a consultant and blogger) is done in plain text – simple, elegant and infinitely more useful. It took me a while to settle down with one system, but now I’m very happy with Simplenote on the iPad, iPhone or desktop and Notational Velocity Alt (nvALT) on the desktop. They sync beautifully together once you enter your username/password. This guarantees a natural backup will always be there. Some of the data is also synced to Dropbox.

Surprisingly, I now have thousands of blog posts, snippets, text and notes accrued in this handy text sync system. While walking around at cancer meetings, I take quick notes of interesting things from the posters or add quotes from chats with presenters straight into Simplenote on the iPad. For oral presentations, these go much faster than my typing skills allow, so I write long hand in my Moleskine and add notes manually in a quiet moment later so that they become searchable and re-usable.

John Gruber’s awesome Markdown syntax (discussed in Daring Fireball) and Fletcher Penny’s Multimarkdown are tools I make use of a lot, especially as conversion tools allows me to preview the text and then convert it to html for cutting and pasting into WordPress, the platform used for this blog. Text Expander Touch on the iPad uses the same master shortcut file as the desktop/laptop versions and makes repetitive typing of various tumour types, for example, so much faster!

Text or RTF files created in apps on the iPad can be synced via Dropbox for later use and aggregation in various desktop apps. I save Markdown notes and snippets as text files in Simplenote or Elements and once on a laptop, drag them to Marked, a cocoa desktop app from Brett Terpestra to preview and convert into html for blog posts or text for reports.

Scrivener is my Word Processor of choice these days, not Word, because it is simply superb for technical research and writing. I can’t wait for the makers to come out with an iPad app! For now, I use different creating tools on the iPad since Scrivener supports a host of different inputs from TXT or RTF files that have been created on the iPad, whether from Simplenote, Index Cards (great for creating an outline), iThoughtsHD (a mind map tool) or Evernote, where I clip and store interesting websites.

Creating short and long form articles, posts and reports is really easy and much faster in Scrivener when you are focusing on the content and not the formatting. Since the export function is very versatile, you can also create different documents formatted as PDFs, LaTeX or epub format (for the Kindle), whichever you choose to apply. Overall, I have found this tool to be extremely versatile and saves me a lot of time.

Other iPad apps I enjoy using include iKinase, which provides a handy tool for finding protein and chemical structures for small molecules and Molecules, which shows 3D molecular structures that you can manipulate with your fingers – very cool.

When travelling, I love the TripIt app for keeping me straight on flight and hotel details, which it picks up from emails sent to my business account and creates itineraries automatically. On the road, though, I tend to use the iPhone more than the iPad for viewing the details as it is smaller and more mobile while waiting at a taxi line. The maps produced from the destination are useful for finding your way around or telling the cab driver where to go!

Another app I have on both my iPhone and iPad are QR code readers but the reality is that it’s much easier to get the code from an iPhone, especially if the code is awkwardly placed on a poster.

Need an app for curating your expenses on the road? iXpenseIt is useful for tracking cash receipts rather than losing or forgetting about them. Many banks also now have iPhone and iPad apps that are worth checking out for scanning checks and checking expenses.

Wondering what one of my favourite apps is? Try the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) quarterly bulletin – a truly beautiful combination of art and science that is a pleasure to read. Reading medical journals on the iPad is also a delight – I read Nature, NEJM and AACR journals regularly on the iPad and download articles as PDFs for easy reading offline while travelling in iBooks.

Overall, I love my iPad as a consumption tool and travel with it regularly to cancer conferences along with my Moleskine and also a laptop for more heavy duty work. There is something about the iPad that makes it hard to put down.

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Pharma and Social Media: Update on abiraterone in advanced prostate cancer

By MaverickNY on August 3, 2011

“Fully 71% of online Americans use video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, up from 66% a year earlier. The use of video-sharing sites on any given day also jumped five percentage points, from 23% of online Americans in May 2010 to 28% in May 2011.”

Pew Internet (2011)

This is a trend I’ve also noticed amongst my friends over the past year, largely driven by more of them using smartphones and iPads, which make sharing and watching video a whole lot easier.

In the past, I’ve been rather frustrated with Pharmaland and their resolutely horrid web 1.0 branded and unbranded websites that have tiny text, are heavy on flash or not mobile optimised, making sharing or even reading challenging, especially on mobile gadgets. Watching a useful video online, but not being able to share it on Twitter or Facebook with others, is one of those typical desk bang moments – why not if you can share the link to the website? The world has moved on in terms of how we interact with websites and people online.

Thus I usually end up clicking out and forgetting about them altogether, unless I really need the Prescribing Information (PI) and have to spend a few minutes scrolling and hunting down a miniscule small link that is almost impossible to click without hitting the adjacent link next to it.

Then every once in while something beautiful comes along…

Yesterday, someone outside the US emailed me asking about access to abiraterone (Zytiga) outside the US, so I went on my iPad and to my delight and surprise found this on the Healthcare Professionals page:

Several key points to note here:

You can share information with others by email and Twitter
The PI was easy to find and click on
The mechanism of action (MOA) video on Vimeo was high quality, interesting and sharable
You can sign up for updates or view press releases easily
The reimbursement support information was also easy to access
The UI is uncluttered, has nice large text and is easy to navigate at a glance

In fact, the whole site was nicely laid out and easy to see things, click where you need to go and navigate with the well-thought out UI. I didn’t have to pinch the screen once, which made a nice change.

Now, there are some glitches such as the patient information was a bit sparse and clicking the Contact Us section took me to the main Janssen website rather than a contact page, forcing me to scroll around looking for it there (hidden at the bottom in pale grey). There’s no international number or email address when you finally find it, leaving me wondering what to advise my reader who contacted me for help. This is where providing global Expanded Access Programs or local country contact details can be helpful – they will inevitably reach out, so not providing any help online is a tad antisocial. There is more than just USA patients with advanced prostate cancer out there, after all.

If anyone from Janssen or Ortho Biotech Global is reading this and could point me in the right direction for helping patients and caregiver outside the US that would be great, as several enquiries a month come in on this topic. There’s nothing worse than no information or not being able to help. Companies ultimately live or die on seamless customer service and helping people with their needs.

The experience was pretty positive and I really liked the abiraterone website – it’s a good example of how nice UI design can make a huge difference to the UX for those visiting. Whichever digital agency was responsible for this site did a very nice job so far and it breaks the cluttered, awkward to navigate with uncomfortably tiny font product website one normally comes across in this field – well done!

I’m hoping the Patient section will soon have some useful information to rival the HCP portal. Putting in country contact details will be a good start in the right direction, as will information about ongoing clinical trials and a well designed, easy to read patient brochure about the disease, treatment and reimbursement information. Yes – they do ask about the price and how they can save money – we get emails on that very topic every month too.

An excellent start overall – looking forward to seeing more developments in the near future!