The Little Chemotherapy That Could

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Abraxis BioScience (Nasdaq: ABII) has mastered the slow and steady growth, not the high-flier growth. But it's going to need to step on the pedal to catch a few more investors' eyes.

Sales of the company's only drug, chemotherapy treatment Abraxane, which it markets with AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), were up almost 7% year over year as Abraxane continues to take market share from the older taxanes -- Bristol-Myers Squibb's (NYSE: BMY) Taxol and Sanofi-Aventis' (NYSE: SNY) Taxotere. It now stands at 42% of the second-line metastatic breast cancer market.

While a 7% growth rate is decent for a drug that's been approved in the U.S. for nearly four years, it feels like there's so much more potential for Abraxane as well as the other drugs in the company's pipeline that use the same nab (nanoparticle albumin-bound) technology to help make chemotherapies more potent.

Those other molecules are still in phase 2 testing, so Abraxis' immediate hope of raising revenue lies on Abraxane expanding into other markets. Next month the company will present data on its use in combination with Genentech's (NYSE: DNA) Avastin and another trial in combination with two generic oncology drugs. It's always easier to bust into a market as an add-on therapy rather than a replacement.

Abraxis is also trying to get Abraxane approved to treat other cancers. It has a phase 3 trial in non-small cell lung cancer currently running and plans to start four more phase 3 trials in the next few months. These will cover melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and a first-line setting for metastatic breast cancer.

Those trials will take some time to get results, but the company could get an immediate boost from launching Abraxane in Europe. The drug was approved in January, but still hasn't been launched. That's perhaps the epitome of "slow and steady."

The other item potentially holding Abraxis back is that it lost a patent infringement suit with Elan (NYSE: ELN) earlier this year. While that'll cost the company at least $55 million if it loses the appeal, Abraxis still has $644 million in the bank, so it's not in danger of running out of money anytime soon.

Abraxis has a lot of potential, but, in this market, the company is going to have to show investors that it can make it over the hill before they're going to jump on board.