The cancer drug Gleevec is among the most successful drugs of this decade, both in medical and financial terms. The drug has produced a nearly 90% five-year survival rate in patients with the once-deadly disease of chronic myeloid leukemia , and it brought its maker, Novartis of Switzerland, nearly $1.9 billion in sales in the first six months of this year. No wonder that the Lasker Foundation is giving its award for clinical research this year to three scientists instrumental in bringing Gleevec to market. The Health Blog spoke with one of the three, Charles Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who treated the first patient in a Gleevec clinical trial while he was at the University of California, Los Angeles. The drug represented a scientific breakthrough because it targets a particular genetic mutation in CML patients, stifling the cancer without the side effects of traditional chemotherapy drugs. But Sawyers reminded us that some at Novartis were skeptical at first of Gleevec’s commercial prospects, given that the disease affects only around 10,000 new patients each year in the U.S. and Europe. “There was a lot of pushback at Novartis about going ahead with Gleevec because of the market size,” Sawyers recalled. Daniel Vasella, the Novartis chief executive who was a strong proponent of getting Gleevec on the market, noted the same issue in

his 2003 book about Gleevec, “Magic Cancer Bullet,” in which he wrote of those who “argued against rushing and taking risks for a drug that would produce such little return on investment.” It turns out insurers and governments will pay a good price for a drug that works. Sawyers was later instrumental in developing a drug called Sprycel that aims at an even smaller market: patients who develop resistance to Gleevec. Sprycel too is a commercial success, bringing in $195 million in the first half of this year for maker Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bonus Lasker: One of the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winners, Shinya Yamanaka , of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute, was recognized for his work on reprogramming adult skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells. He told our colleague Shirley Wang in a recent interview that when he set up his own lab 10 years ago, he thought the task of reprogramming adults cells would take him a lifetime of work to achieve, not just the few years it actually took him. Now, he’s working on figuring out the kinks in the reprogramming process so these cells can one day be used therapeutically in humans. Read more about Yamanaka in the WSJ . Photo: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

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Gleevec’s Lesson: Medical Success Trumps Small Market