Pharma companies form cancer-beating alliance

By Drew Contessa, Editor

Why three of pharmaceutical’s biggest companies are heading to Asia to join forces for the greater good.

“We've done a very good job as an industry and that's where the innovation defecit comes from.”

This February was witness to three of pharmaceutical’s biggest giants, Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly, as they collaborated to form the Asian Cancer Research Group, Inc. (ACRG). The fully independent, not-for-profit company was established to accelerate research and ultimately improve treatment for patients affected with the most commonly diagnosed cancers in Asia.

With a growing trend in pre-competitive collaborations between pharmaceutical companies being noted in recent months, the ACRGs formation is a prime example of how pharmaceutical companies are combining their resources and expertise to rapidly increase their knowledge base of disease and disease processes. The heart of the ACRG is to improve the available knowledge of cancers prevalent in Asia and to accelerate drug discovery efforts by freely sharing the resulting data with the scientific community.

Gary Gilliland, SVP and franchise head for Oncology at Merck, confirmed: “Through its work and the subsequent sharing of information, the ACRG hopes to empower researchers, foster innovation and improve the prognosis and treatment of patients with cancer.” Initially, the ACRG will focus on the two most common cancers in Asia – lung and gastric cancers. As many as 40 percent of patients with lung cancer in Asia demonstrate a mutation known as an epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, that seems to remain relatively uncommon in the Western population.

However, while it’s clear that EGFR mutations are indeed a larger concern for Asian patients, it is of specific interest to note that they not ‘rare’ in Western patients, and as such should be part of a paradigm shift to change the mentality and understanding of the patient pharmocogenomic in order for clinicians to be able to treat each patient appropriately based on their mutation status in both Eastern and Western populations. In addition, the mutation responds differently to certain types of agents, suggesting that an alternative approach is needed in developing treatments for certain patient populations.

The flip side of the coin will see the ACRG dealing with gastric cancer, which has reached near epidemic proportions in China, Japan and Korea, making it the second largest cause of cancer death worldwide, killing more than 630,000 patients per year – more people than all cancers combined in the US.

Neil Gibson, Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer’s Oncology Research Unit, stated: “Environmental and genetic factors are believed to underlie the dramatic differences in the molecular subtypes and incidence of cancer in Asia and other parts of the world. Although some progress has been achieved in the last few years in understanding and treating these cancers, they remain a huge unmet need and a disproportionate health burden to Asian patients.”

Over the next two years, the three pharmaceutical giants have committed to create one of the most extensive pharmacogenomic cancer databases ever witnessed. It will be composed of data from approximately 2000 tissue samples from patients with lung and gastric cancers, which will be made publicly available to researchers and, over time, further populated with clinical data from analysis of patient data. It is hoped that conducting such comparisons of the contrasting genomic signatures of these cancers could inform new approaches to treatment that is sorely needed.

In terms of divvying up responsibility, Eli Lilly has dedicated itself to taking on providing the data to the research public through and open-source concept managed by its Singapore research site, with all three companies throwing all they have in terms of technical and intellectual expertise into the project.

Kerry Blanchard, VP and leader of drug development in China for Eli Lilly, was extremely positive about the project, saying: “The ACRG is about sharing information for the common good. This company will aid researchers around the world to develop diagnostics, tailor current treatments and develop novel therapies to improve outcomes for affected patients with lung, gastric and perhaps other forms of cancer.”

For the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare alike, the ACRG could hopefully prove to be the ignition point in combating cancers in the Asia-Pacific region; considering the current state of the pharmaceutical pipeline, it could also turn out to be some good reconnaissance for the future of emerging markets within the industry.