(Source: The Economic Times 2014-5-08）
Reasons for mega-mergers are not always easy to establish from the outside, but that does not keep people from trying to find them anyway. In the recent $100 billion offer of PfizerBSE 0.10 % to buy the British firm AstraZeneca, nearly every analyst was unanimous about the primary motives: to exploit the patentlinked lower tax rates in the UK and to access AztraZenecas anti-cancer pipeline.
Pfizer, in spite of spending $6-7 billion a year on research and development, does not have a good anti-cancer pipeline. AstraZenecaBSE -0.38 % does, and Pfizer wants to grab it quickly. But the story does not end there. This was not the first deal in recent times that had a strong link to cancer drugs.
Two weeks ago, NovartisBSE 0.32 % bought GlaxoSmithKlines cancer division for $16 billion, including a strong early-stage pipeline of potential drugs. Pfizer made a second offer to AstraZeneca last weekend. It was rejected, but industry observers think the last word on this issue has not been heard yet.
Pfizer will pursue its takeover goals relentlessly, and so will several other companies in search of new therapies for cancer. So, cancer is set to drive a major consolidation in the industry, as pharma and biotech companies compete to build good anti-cancer pipelines and develop drug superior combinations.
After a long and uncertain period, cancer therapy suddenly seems to be heating up, holding both promise for patients and business for drug companies. “We are at a very interesting point in cancer R&D,” says Debasish Roychowdhury, former head of oncology at Sanofi and now a pharma consultant based near Boston in the US.
“We have an interesting confluence of scientific understanding, drug development technology and flexibility from regulators.” In an earlier job, Roychowdhury was heading the development of the GSK anti-cancer pipeline that Novartis has now bought.
Although drug companies have sunk a large amount of money in R&D over the decades, cancer has been holding out strongly against most kinds of barbs thrown at it. Some drug companies have indeed prospered selling cancer drugs, but patients have got questionable value out of many recent launches, as they cost so much and deliver so little.
According to a recent review in the New England Journal of Medicine, the average cost of one year of cancer treatment in the West is $100,000, and the returns not so high. There are exceptions of course, but many new drugs improve the median survival rates only by a few months but still end up costing as much as $100,000 or more a year.
Although prices of cancer drugs are not expected to go down in the future, many industry observers now think that treatment outcomes will improve significantly with the new generation of anti-cancer drugs. This is because they do not attempt to kill cancer cells by brute force, also taking down the bodys healthy cells with it, but through finesse.
There are many new approaches being tried by drug companies, and some of them are providing very good results in early trials. One important line of research, probably the most important, attempts to persuade the bodys immune system to attack and kill the tumour.
The immune system is programmed to do that anyway, but cancer cells have found out ways to beat its efforts. Cancer immunotherapy tries to remove the obstacles cancer puts in front of the immune system and then let the bodys natural defence mechanism take its own course.
AstraZeneca has a very good pipeline of immunotherapy drugs, which was what attracted Pfizer. For example, its immunotherapy compound MEI4736 has recently advanced into phase-III clinical trials (the testing stage before launch).
A company spokesperson says that this compound, originally for melanoma (a type of deadly skin cancer), has been found to be effective for non-small cell lung cancer, a disease not thought to be a candidate for immunotherapy.
Other significant immunotherapy compounds include Mercks—the company is called MSD in India—MK3475 for melanoma and other cancers, Roches MPDL3280A for lung cancer, and Bristol-Myers Squibbs Elotuzumab. There are more than a hundred other trials going on for cancer, a large number of them for immunotherapy drugs.
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