Success of Targeted Cancer Therapies Underscores Need for Pro-Innovation R&D Environment
A class of targeted cancer therapies could one day replace traditional chemotherapy as a first-line treatment, shining a spotlight on the need for a regulatory environment that supports continued innovation—and stays away from price controls that reduce R&D budgets.
What’s going on: “Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) have taken major strides in recent years, as companies … are developing drugs in the space that could ease the trials of cancer treatment,” according to CNBC.
- ADCs are designed to target cancer cells using chemotherapy without harming surrounding healthy tissue and may have fewer side effects than traditional chemotherapy.
- Though ADCs have been on the market since 2000, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have made significant strides improving them in recent years, and some ADCs have become the preferred treatment for certain cancers.
- Biopharmaceutical firms including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Lilly and Merck have invested heavily in the development of ADCs.
Who’s doing what: Pfizer’s Enhertu is approved in the U.S. for the treatment of certain lung, gastric and breast cancers. In a trial in which it was used as a first treatment, Enhertu stalled the growth—by more than a year—of a common type of breast cancer.
- Merck’s Keytruda is viewed and used as a first-line treatment for bladder cancer. With Keytruda’s patent expiration nearing, Merck has been co-developing three new ADCs with global health care company Daiichi Sankyo.
- Pharmaceutical company Lilly is developing ADCs that do not use chemotherapy, according to Lilly Oncology President Jake Van Naarden. New kinds of payloads, Van Naarden said, could help cancer “patients who relapse on existing ADCs, shrinking their ‘newly growing cancers’ again in ‘a durable way.’”
- And just this week, drugmaker Roche announced that it has “demonstrated the power of combining two of oncology’s hottest modalities—bispecifics and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs)—in a Lunsumio-Polivy regimen in large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL),” according to Fierce Pharma.
What it means for innovation: ADCs are just one example of how the biopharmaceutical industry’s leadership is improving and lengthening lives. So it can continue that mission, the U.S. must stay away from drug price fixing, according to the NAM.
- “Manufacturers in America are driving global pharmaceutical innovation, and importing foreign price controls on innovative biopharmaceutical products would undercut innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, threaten patient access and weaken U.S. competitiveness,” NAM Director of Health Care Policy Jess Wysocky said in May.