The Change Mariner

First Anti-Angiogenesis Drug Wins Approval

New York Times:

The Genentech drug Avastin, which validated a decades-old theory about a new way to attack cancer while spurring investor enthusiasm for the biotechnology industry, won approval yesterday from the Food and Drug Administration.

The drug, approved for patients with colorectal cancer that has spread to other organs, is far from a cure. But in a clinical trial in which it was used with chemotherapy, people who received the drug lived a median of 20.3 months, almost five months longer than those who received only chemotherapy.

Many analysts characterize the drug as the most significant to come from the biotechnology industry in years, with sales expected to eventually reach $2 billion a year or more. Those estimates might grow because the approval by the F.D.A. was worded in a way that might allow doctors to use the drug more liberally than expected.

Avastin is the first drug to be approved that works by choking off the blood vessels that provide a tumor with oxygen and nutrients. That idea for fighting cancer, first proposed by Dr. Judah Folkman of Harvard and Children's Hospital Boston more than 30 years ago, has been difficult to get to work in practice.

Posted by Timothy Fredel at February 27, 2004 12:54 PM | TrackBack
Related Categories: Industry - Healthcare | Industry - Pharmaceutical/Biotech | Quadrant - Technological | Theme - 'The Biotech Century'

Dr Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer
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Angiogenesis in Brain Tumors (Cancer Treatment and Research, 117)
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Angiogenesis Protocols (Methods in Molecular Medicine)
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