More Than 300 Biotech Drugs in the Works
More than 300 different biotechnology medicines are in development, including vaccines against cancer and drugs to treat a whole range of diseases, U.S. drug makers said Friday.
Nearly half the drugs in development, 151 out of 350, are meant to fight cancer, the annual report by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America found.
It said 140 different pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies were working on the drugs.
“This is a whole new era that we are moving into and people aren’t even noticing,” Dr. John Siegfried, deputy vice president for science and regulatory affairs at PhRMA, said in a telephone interview.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time to see disease begin to be attacked at the genetic level, at the chromosome level. . . . When I started to practice, that was unheard of. It was Buck Rogers stuff, and now it’s happening.”
Biotechnology medicines in development include a flu vaccine being developed by Protein Sciences of Meriden, Conn.; the skin cancer drug Proleukin developed by Emeryville, Calif.-based Chiron Corp.; and a cancer vaccine developed by Canada’s Biomira Inc.
Proleukin, already licensed for treating renal cell cancer that has spread throughout the body, is a genetically engineered version of interleukin-2, a naturally occurring, immune system signaling chemical. It stimulates the body to destroy abnormal cancer cells.
Biomira’s vaccine alerts the body’s immune system to the presence of MUC-1, a protein found on the surface of 90% of common solid tumors, including breast, ovarian and lung cancer. It is being tested in non-small-cell lung cancer, of which there are an estimated 149,000 new cases in North America each year, killing 133,000 people.
The road ahead is not all rosy, PhRMA warns. For instance, patent battles loom, such as a fight over who owns the rights to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes.
Ethical issues also are involved, he said.
“The whole concept of messing around with genes--people may say, ‘I don’t want to do it, but if you tell me that messing around with his genes will save my son, then I am going to want to do it,’ ” he said.
