Pharma Strategy Blog

Commentary on Pharma & Biotech Oncology / Hematology New Product Development

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Getting back to the blogging groove after 3 weeks on the road at successive conferences (AUA, ASCO and EHA) is a bit of a shock, so the first post will be short and pithy.

AUA will be remembered for incredibly unsocial and early 6am education session starts.  No thanks, with three meetings in a row stamina trumps insanity by a long shot.  At ASCO, the Chicago venue is sprawling with long walks between sessions that appear to have no theme or cohesion around them and of course, the Press Room is way out in left field over the walkway no matter where you need to go.  The S406 Vista Room was particularly bad and became notorious for the #blisterwalk on Twitter.  Never again will I complain about switching between Halls A and F at Orlando, that's a piece of cake by comparison!

The second big difference I noticed between US and EU meetings was the presence or absence of chotchkes.  In the US they are now verboten of course, but the EU has no such constraints.

Now, I'm not sure a branded laptop sleeve or a Post-it pad ever made a difference to prescribing habits, but well done journal reprint carriers with a clear summary of the data do make a difference in oncology.  They help reinforce the efficacy, survival curves and key messages to your audience.

One thing I particularly remember most from EHA was a very well done piece that clearly differentiated the brand from the competitor, with data I hadn't noticed before.  Talking to some of the hematologists, they were equally interested in the pieces too as they included a peer reviewed journal reprint.  Some were taking copies back to share and discuss the data with their colleagues, which I found interesting.  What's going to have more impact – a branded item with no message or a clinical paper?

The Roche booth was particularly busy whenever I visited the exhibits.  The reason?  Great espresso coffee and the best quality nibbles, much appreciated early in the morning and late afternoon by drooping attendees.  I was less enthused by the aggressive ladies on the stand who wouldn't let me play with the interactive education quizzes for a USB key because the press passes didn't have a bar code on them.  I desperately needed a USB key to share a file with a physician.  We both walked away from that with a negative impression that overrode the nice refreshments.  A little flexibility goes a long way.

The other neat thing at the European Hematology Association meeting in Barcelona was a CD of many of the biology and clinical posters.  Great stuff, saves hours of work trying to piece together snippets taken on an iPhone!

Perhaps my favourite thing about European meetings, aside from the relaxed sociable hours with time to network with people, was the integration and inclusion of the patient advocate voice.  Critical, but largely ignored in American meetings.  More on this in another post.

This week I'll be putting up some synopses of data found interesting from the meetings, but the analyses may well be very different from what you saw in the news items.  Some of the reporting at ASCO in particular was sketchy puff pieces or hype at best, with very little real understanding of what the data actually means.

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I've been getting a lot of enquiries lately about what I think will be interesting at ASCO this year, so next week will see a couple of posts on this topic after some research has been completed with the crystal ball this weekend.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) will be in Chicago rather than Orlando in June for the next 10 years and have announced that this year's hashtag is #ASCO10.  You can follow all the chatter around the topic on Twitter for the next 2 months, no doubt.  

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It will be interesting to see what they are doing with social media after the success their cousins at the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) have been having, particularly with the warmth with which they (AACR) have encouraged and embraced science bloggers and Tweeters.

What I liked about AACR's approach is that they did a great job sharing and rolling out the science for those who were following via podcasts and webcasts both on their site and also in iTunes. When EU presenters were unable to attend key presentations due to the Volcano, they didn't miss a beat and improvised with teleconferences to live slides.  Great job!

In comparison, I confess that I was a little disappointed to see ASCO are charging $100 a pop for podcasts and $75 for the virtual meeting with no audio. Clearly a much more commercial organisation.

Still, it's usually an interesting meeting packed with data and a great opportunity to see what's coming through in early phase I trials from preclinical research.

In the meantime, if you have any specific requests, please add them to the comments below and I'll do my best to include them in the pre-meeting analysis.

Watch this space!

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There is a lot going on in the world of Pharmaceuticals.  Drugs are being discovered, being marketed, and, far too often it seems, being recalled.

How much will a new medication sell?  Will it make through the clinical trials without being thrown out for lack of efficacy, toxicity, or other issues?

Well, I had a nice surprise this morning – it seems that Pharma Strategy Blog is #7 out of the top Pharma Analysis blogs. The leaders are Ed Silverman’s Pharmalot, Jack Friday’s Pharma Gossip and Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline.

I was delighted and honoured to even be in a list with such company, but was most amused to see that a sex change appears to have occurred in the process :-).

Posted via web from sally church’s posterous

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Things were so busy in the Icarus office yesterday I didn’t get a moment to post on the Roche/Genentech news that the latest topline phase III trial analysis for bevacizumab (Avastin) were disappointing.  The company announced the findings in a press release:

“Avastin (bevacizumab) in combination with Xeloda (capecitabine) or fluorouracil and cisplatin chemotherapy in patients with inoperable, advanced or metastatic gastric cancer (stomach cancer). The study, known as AVAGAST, did not meet its primary endpoint of extending overall survival in patients treated with Avastin in combination with chemotherapy compared to the same chemotherapy plus placebo.”

The full data will be presented at ASCO in June.

Now, while initially disappointing, anyone who was at ASCO last year will remember the stunning data from the ToGA trial, presented by Eric van Cutsem.  This study looked at the benefit of adding a different Roche drug, trastuzumab (Herceptin), to standard chemotherapy in patients with HER2 positive gastric cancer, and found a significant benefit of approximately 2.5 months compared to chemotherapy alone.

What is the significance of these two trials for gastric cancer?

Well, Avastin targets VEGF, Herceptin targets HER2, the first was negative, the second positive, which may tell us something useful about the biology of the disease and what mechanisms are driving the tumour growth.

Sometimes a negative result tells us more than we may realise at first.  It helps define what really matters.

As you may already be aware, one of the primary reasons the National Cancer Institute is building the new Riverside Research Park is to provide space for “synergistic partners” from academia and Industry to work together to cure cancer.  I was just alerted to several new opportunities by my friends at FITCI

A new collaboration opportunity, “Gene Expression Signature Predictive of Response to Chemotherapy” has been added to the NCI Technology Transfer Center web site. Please go to: http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/opportunities/opportunity.php?opp_id=1881

A new collaboration opportunity, “Antibody and Immunotoxin Treatments for Mesothelin-Expressing Cancers” has been added to the NCI Technology Transfer Center web site. Please go to: http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/opportunities/opportunity.php?opp_id=1883

A new collaboration opportunity, “Knockdown and Enhanced Expression of P53 Isoforms to Treat Age-Related Disorders and Cancer” has been added to the NCI Technology Transfer Center web site. Please go to: http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/opportunities/opportunity.php?opp_id=1885

A new collaboration opportunity, “Engineered Biological Pacemakers” has been added to the NCI Technology Transfer Center web site. Please go to: http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/opportunities/opportunity.php?opp_id=1884

A new collaboration opportunity, “Novel Kinase Inhibitors Targeting the PH Domain of AKT for Preventing and Treating Cancer” has been added to the NCI Technology Transfer Center web site. Please go to: http://ttc.nci.nih.gov/opportunities/opportunity.php?opp_id=1882

Interested? Or know someone who might be?

Click on the links to see more details. Spread the word!

(HT Jim Hardy @fredcobio)

Posted via web from sally church’s posterous

In the last 10 years, scientists have looked deeper into the mechanics of life than ever before. They have learned how molecules come together to make living organisms, how biological glitches cause common diseases, and have come within a whisker of creating new lifeforms in the laboratory.

Genetics was at the heart of the revolution. Scientific and technological advances allowed researchers to read every letter of an organism’s genome. The letters make genes, which are the templates for proteins that make cells. And the cells, in the tens of trillions, build the animals and plants around us.

The first major achievement came in 2001 when the 13-year, $4bn (£2.5bn) human genome project produced the first draft of the human genetic code. The huge task became a race between a global consortium of publicly funded scientists and an American genetics pioneer, Craig Venter.

This vividly reminds me of a summer school biology project we had to write way back in 1980 entitled “Life on Earth – what will the next decade hold in Biology?”

My biology teacher was rather annoyed at the annual PTA meeting my parents attended with what she called my “incredulous futuristic sci-fi” predictions that the human genome would be sequenced and we would start to unlock the code to health and disease.

Hmmm, well, wrong decade and only by 10 years, but hey! it’s happening right here, right now.

Sometimes all you need is a little imagination, patience and a few billion dollars to make dreams come true 🙂

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