(TheConservativeTimes.org) – Drugmakers are betting billions of dollars on targeted radiation directly to tumors to be the next big cancer treatment.
Pharmaceutical companies like Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca have spent almost ten billion dollars on deals to work with radiopharmaceutical makers.
Said Michael Schmidt of Guggenheim Securities,“Any large company that has a business presence in oncology or for whom oncology is an important therapeutic category will probably need exposure in this area one way or another.”
Novartis already has two radiopharmaceuticals available, and there are a few others that are in development. However, according to Schmidt, it’s hard to estimate the total market opportunity for this, especially since there are many different kinds of cancers that the drug can treat.
The drugs would work by attaching radioactive material to a targeting molecule that would search for and attach itself to a specific marker on the cancer cells. The biggest trick here is to ensure that it attaches itself to cancer cells and not healthy cells, which will allow the radiation to target cancer cells and spare the rest of the healthy cells.
Proving the efficacy of this strategy has taken time both scientifically and financially. Although radiopharmaceuticals have been around since the early 2000s, interest from the larger pharmaceutical companies hasn’t occurred until recently.
Novartis won approval a few years back for a radiopharmaceutical drug, called Lutathera, for a rare type of cancer in the pancreas and gastrointestinal tract.
Successes such as these sparked a larger interest into radiopharmaceuticals. Jacob Van Naarden, president of Eli Lilly’s oncology business, said, “We took all that together and thought, we should do something, we need to do deals here.”
Novartis faced its own challenges initially with the drug Pluvicto when they were unable to meet demand, and now they are investing three hundred million dollars to develop more sites for radiopharmaceutical manufacturing in the United States.
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