Amgen aims for oncology expansion and a wider denosumab license
pharmafile | January 12, 2011 | News story | Research and Development | AMG- 479, AMG-386, Amgen, Cancer, Pancreatic cancer, denosumab, motasenib
Amgen is seeking to increase the use of its bone drug denosumab and further its reach into the oncology market, it told investors this week.
Denosumab was approved in the US last November to prevent serious bone problems in patients with solid tumour cancers and is approved to treat osteoporosis under the brand name Prolia and known as Xgeva in oncology.
Chairman and chief executive of Amgen, Kevin Sharer, told delegates at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco: “After working for 15 years, investing a billion and a half dollars and overcoming many challenges, we brought to market two very important medicines that we are very optimistic about,” referring to the two forms of denosumab the company is now marketing.
Amgen is now seeking to widen denosumab’s oncology licence from the prevention of skeletal-related events (SREs) in patients with bone metastases from solid tumours to a new indication to treat SREs in patients with multiple myeloma.
The Densoumab franchise has been forecast to be worth over $5 billion a year from 2016, according to industry analysts at EvaluatePharma, and the additional indication could further boost the drug’s potential.
Denosumab, which has been submitted to European regulators for approval, will be Amgen’s main focus for the immediate future, but the company has also begun late-stage testing on three new cancer drug candidates, said Sean Harper, Amgen’s chief medical officer, in an interview with Bloomberg.
One of Amgen’s new cancer drugs is motasenib, which is being developed with Takeda and has entered phase III trials for a number of cancers including HER2 negative breast cancer.
Its second late-stage cancer drug AMG-386 moved into phase III trials for ovarian and other gynaecological cancers in October and phase III trials of AMG- 479 in pancreatic cancer are set to begin in February.
Harper said Amgen would also continue to research and develop drugs for immunology, cardiovascular disease and other indications and stressed that the company shouldn’t be thought of as just a cancer-treatment company.
“There’s no way we could grow Amgen just based on oncology,” Harper said. “I feel very good about the fact that we haven’t built an oncology-focussed pipeline, it’s a healthy proportion of our pipeline.”
Ben Adams
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