Pursuing breakthrough in cancer drug research & development
Here’s how to get the right medicines to the right patients faster.
The pharmaceutical industry continues to pursue the discovery of medicines for cancer patients with unprecedented rigor. Over the past several years, three major trends have reflected this pursuit. They include the growth of the industry pipeline of cancer-drug candidates, the evolution of the clinical-trial landscape, and the explosion of available clinical and real-world data. The cancer-drug pipeline and associated investment has been growing substantially. We estimate that currently more than $100 billion is invested in oncology R&D annually. With this investment, the number of active compounds in oncology R&D has quadrupled since 1996 and nearly doubled since 2010 alone. Today, oncology makes up nearly 47 percent of the global clinical pipeline
Indar Pharmaceutical research & development
Recent approvals for oncology drugs have seen an increasing proportion directed to specific genetic targets identified with an associated companion diagnostic test. In addition, there is a wave of drugs directed against immune ‘checkpoints’ which promise to transform the way cancer is treated in the next decade. We can increase the probability of success in drug development based on a thorough mechanistic understanding of how a target drug affects cancer biology and the specific biological and genotypic context in which it operates.
Over the last couple of decades compared to the 1990s the success rates for drug development have fallen significantly across all therapeutic areas, including oncology and this decline has been widely discussed with some articles implying further inevitable decline . However looking in more recent years there is clear evidence of innovative new medicines making it successfully through the pharmaceutical industry pipelines. Since 2011, 50+ novel cancer medicines have had a first indication approved by the US FDA . The pattern emerging from the successfully developed drugs is that an increasing proportion are targeted to patient populations where cancer growth is driven by a pathway specifically inhibited by the drug.