From here.
Celgene (CELG) Corp.’s Abraxane and Bristol- Myers Squibb Co.’s (BMY) Ixempra breast-cancer drugs worked no better at delaying tumor growth than a less-expensive chemotherapy that’s been the backbone of treatment for 20 years.
Newly treated patients taking paclitaxel, a generic drug, lived a month longer than those given Abraxane, a modified form of the same medicine, and three months longer than those taking Ixempra, according to data reported today at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.
Abraxane and Ixempra cost from $4,000 to $5,000 a dose, according to their manufacturers. The price of paclitaxel varies though it is significantly less than the newer treatments, said Hope Rugo, a breast cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco and a study researcher. The price difference may prompt some doctors to reconsider Abraxane as a first treatment in some patients, said Shanu Modi, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Well, it was basically expected due to Big Pharma is not very much interested in the development of effective drugs. The majority of new costly medicines is less effective than cheap generica medicines.
Some more numbers:
Celgene has said it expects Abraxane sales of as much as $1.2 billion in 2015 as it expands its use in other tumors. The drugmaker paid $2.9 billion to acquire Abraxane’s maker, Abraxis BioScience Inc., in 2010. Abraxane’s “nab” technology combines paclitaxel with the protein albumin, enabling the drug to be given at a higher dose and breach blood vessel walls more effectively, according to the company.
The most ironic issue here is that all popular and very expensive monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) like Avastin is so ineffective as monotherapy that the only possibility to use them is just in combination with usual and cheap generica! Despite its simplicity this strategy makes fortune for Big Pharma. Big Pharma definitively likes this game!
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