By my count, Pfizer's
The drugmaker said yesterday that Sutent failed to improve survival in lung cancer patients when combined with Roche and OSI Pharmaceuticals'
Batting .500 isn't so bad for baseball players or cancer therapies. The problem is that the lung and breast cancer markets are large markets. Gastrointestinal stromal cancer? Not so much.
Adding just liver cancer on top of kidney cancer helped Bayer and Onyx Pharmaceuticals'
To hit the big time -- think Eli Lilly's
After multiple failures on its own and in combination with other drugs, expanding into breast cancer doesn't seem likely. There may be some hope for Sutent as a lung cancer treatment because the drug was able to extend the time it took for the tumors to resume growing. If the drugmaker can find a subset of patients with a certain genetic makeup that makes their tumors more responsive to Sutent, Pfizer could get approval for treating just that subset of patients.
Pfizer will need to run another clinical trial, but the financial benefits could be worth the added cost. Any added revenue would make this wonder drug a little more wonderful.
Check out Eric Bleeker's call in today's buy opportunity.