AZ and Pfizer support personalised medicine database
pharmafile | February 8, 2011 | News story | Research and Development | AZ, AstraZeneca, Cancer Research UK, Iressa, Pfizer, crizotinib, gefitinib, personalised medicine
AstraZeneca and Pfizer have teamed up with leading charity Cancer Research UK to help develop its stratified medicines programme.
Stratified medicine – or personalised medicine as it has become known – is a new direction of oncology drug research that aims to make more targeted treatments for cancer patients.
Such drugs include AstraZeneca’s lung cancer drug Iressa (gefitinib), which targets a specific EGFR mutation, and Pfizer’s late-stage crizotinib candidate, also for lung cancer, that targets the ALK mutation.
Dr Susan Galbraith, head of oncology at AZ, said: “This collaboration is particularly exciting as by building a database of tumour genetic information, treatments and outcomes, we can better understand which targets for new drugs occur in which patients.
“The information currently available on this is often incomplete – this kind of testing will mean better selection of patients for clinical trials with drugs that are more likely to make an impact on their disease.”
Cancer Research UK’s Stratified Medicine Programme will promote research into new targeted treatments by building a database of genetic information about tumours, treatments and survival rates that will enable researchers to design more effective cancer treatments in the future.
The charity will select six hospitals and three labs to collect tumour samples from 9,000 cancer patients around the UK, and test them for a set of gene faults specifically linked to cancer, known as molecular diagnosis.
Molecular diagnosis of tumours is not yet available for all patients on the NHS and currently only possible using a single test for each mutation.
The programme also aims to develop a multi-gene panel that can test for genetic markers for drugs already used in the clinic, such as Iressa, as well as those for promising new drugs in late-stage trials, such as Pfizer’s crizotinib.
Rob Day, head of Pfizer Oncology UK, said: “Personalised medicines are likely to transform the way cancer is treated in the future – as a company dedicated to advancing oncology research, Pfizer Oncology is focused on discovering gene-specific targeted medicines to improve outcomes for patients with cancer.”
The £5.5m programme will be led by Cancer Research UK, with funding from both AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
It is closely aligned with the Technology Strategy Board’s £5.6 million investment in tumour profiling and data capture.
Ben Adams
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