The Next Taxol?
businessweek.com
Supergen, a small pharmaceutical company in San Ramon,
Calif., is in the final stages of testing a powerful new drug called
rubitecan for pancreatic cancer, a disease that
currently has no effective treatment. So potent is the drug
that physicians are already calling it the next Taxol, a
cancer drug with more than $1 billion in worldwide sales
annually.
About 600 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer,
which kills 30,000 Americans annually, are being treated
with rubitecan. Early studies show that the drug, which can
be taken orally, has few side-effects and appears to work
against the most aggressive tumors. Even patients who
failed to respond to radiation began improving once they
started on rubitecan. In one trial, for instance, doctors
found that the pancreatic tumors of two-thirds of the
patients shrank or ceased to grow after just eight weeks on
the drug.
The active ingredient in rubitecan belongs to a class of
drugs first isolated from a Chinese flowering tree called
Camptotheca acuminata. These so-called camptothecins
inhibit a key enzyme required for cell division. Because
cancer cells grow and divide so rapidly, they are much
more sensitive to camptothecins than normal cells.
SuperGen is now testing to see if rubitecan is effective
in killing other cancers, including those of the lung and breast.
The company hopes to begin marketing the drug sometime in 2001. |
