Novartis Drug Draws Hope for Rare Pancreatic Cancer
by Chrysalis De Vera in Diseases on Jun 04, 2011
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Novartis AG’s Cancer drug Afinitor to be one of the few treatment options for a rare type of pancreatic cancer.
The Swiss drug maker, Novartis said, “Data show Afinitor delays tumor growth and reduces risk of disease progression in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumors (NET) of pancreatic origin.” Furthermore, they emphasized that this marked the very first approval of a treatment for a patient population in the United States for nearly 30 years already.
The approval has gone through controversies as some of the experts say that it has some serious side effects. It was last month that a US advisory panel unanimously voted for the drug’s use in the treatment of patients diagnosed with advanced pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors.
According to Thomas Reuters calculation, Afinitor has been already approved for treating kidney cancer and is expected to push in an amount of $1.3 billion sales in 2015.
Since there were some concerns about the side effects that this drug could cause, the Novartis submitted applications for the use of Afinitor as treatment to pancreatic cancer to the European Medicine Agency and the Swiss regulator. They also narrowed the approval application after assessing the reviewer’s comments.
Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors are known to be rare, having a rate of about 0.32 cases in every 100,000 people. These tumors usually grow slower than other pancreatic cancers that kill in just a few months of diagnosis.
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