The Big Red Biotech Blog

China Changes Patent Laws To Get Cheap Drugs

Oh-oh! China's new IP law allowing compulsory licensing of drugs under patent came into effect as of May 1, 2012. The revised law is called the Measures for the Compulsory Licensing for Patent Implementation and is expected to open the doors for low-cost generic versions of patented drugs. The law also allows export of these drugs to other countries.

China Changes Patent Laws To Get Cheap Drugs // Pharmalot.

China announced this move in a seminar last month.  It seems to confirm that China's intent is to become a generic producer for the domestic and international market. Now we have both China and India issuing compulsory licenses.

Global drugmakers need to take heed as China already has many companies producing active ingredients for domestic and global suppliers. They can make generics and apparently will. With both India and China moving toward making more generic copies of patented drugs, this can't do anything but put more pressure on Big Pharma revenues. It looks like the pharmerging markets won't necessarily offer virgin territory to be mined by Western companies looking to gain compensory sales to make up for lagging sales in the West.

Posted by Bruce Lehr June 8th 2012

 

Is Cancer Research Focused on Too Few Targets?

Just when we were all pumped about the news coming out of ASCO this week, leave it to the Life Sci VC blog to throw us a curve by pointing out how concentrated the pharma industry's efforts are with regard to cancer targets being investigated.  And, Bruce's argument is supported by facts and data. I hate that. I try to never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The blog post notes that of the 990 cancer programs, greater than 20% are aimed at 8 targets, each of which has more than 24 programs in clinical development. VEGF itself has 70!  The data is presented in a bar chart in the post. By Bruce's estimates, $5 B+ has been spent in the past few years on these programs.  He points out that they ALL can't be winners.  This appears to be an egregious waste of resources at the expense of more novel but unproven targets.

This illustrates one of the problems we've been seeing with the lack of productivity of Big Pharma R&D as embodied by failed programs and low ROIs.  There's a lot of me-too thinking that undoubtedly arises out of a desire to reduce risk and increase success -- but the calvary charge of projects concentrated on a few targets virtually guarantees a lot of commercial failures.  Only so many people can fit in the pool before it overflows.

It is an interesting post and I think you should read it for yourself.  He concludes the pieces by saying,

"We need to stop being target lemmings, or our group-think and risk avoidance will run our industry off a cliff."  Now that's something to ponder (and correct if you agree) before it's too late.

Posted by Bruce Lehr June 7th 2012.

 

Reports on ASCO Consolidated

Today you can read summaries of the going's on at ASCO as reported in Pharmalot, Fierce Biotech and Xconomy.  Clearly the cancer treatment world is heating up and there were a number of exciting clinical trials reported on at this year's meetings.  The concensus seems to be the companies following made the biggest splashes (with patients, analysts and investors) with their clinical results.

Who Got The Most Buzz At The Noisy ASCO Fair? // Pharmalot.

In the order mentioned in the Pharmalot post:

• J&J reported on Zytiga for treatment of prostate cancer for patients who have not received chemo
• Roche reported results on its latest stage antibody-drug conjugate, T-DM1, for the treatment of breast cancer. Roche says it has 8 ADCs in the clinic and 25 in its pipeline targeted at cancers
• BMS reported on its drug, BMS-936558, which targets PD-1 in a variety of cancer cells. BMS hopes to establish this as a blockbuster for a number of cancers. PD-1 encourages the patient's immune system to fight the cancer
• Bayer reported on regorafenib for the treatment of stomach cancer. It is also being directed toward colorectal cancers and gastrointestinal stromal tumors

Other notable results were reported by Dendreon (prostate), Ariad Pharmaceuticals (CML), Onyx Pharmaceuticals (colorectal cancer), Aveo (kidney cancer), and GSK (melanoma). 

These drugs have the potential to change the standard of care and the "empowered antibodies" being pushed by Roche utilizing technologies from Seattle Genetics or Immunogen look to usher in the world of ADCs with so-called "smart bombs".  All and all an exciting conference with exciting results.

Posted by Bruce Lehr June 6th 2012.