Forbes is also on the ball with this article on AMGN - I suspect the long-term impact of frequent chemo with concomitant Neupogen is going to be very substantial:
Biotechnology
Amgen's Early Christmas Present
Matthew Herper, 12.13.02, 7:00 AM ET
NEW YORK - Amgen warmed the market's heart yesterday by raising its earnings projections for 2003, saying it would beat analyst consensus by as much as 9%. The stock rose nearly 7% to $50.54. But there was other good news for the Thousand Oaks, Calif-based biotechnology giant, in the form of new clinical data that will help its blockbusters grow even larger.
One of the best pieces of data
was a gift from a study funded by
the National Cancer Institute. The study of 2,005 women didn't focus on Amgen (nasdaq: AMGN - news - people ) at all. Its main purpose was to prove that giving chemotherapy doses more often kept cancer from recurring in woman who had breast cancer tumors and lymph nodes removed. Its surprising conclusion: Giving chemotherapy more frequently reduced the number of deaths from breast cancer by 31%. The data were presented at an annual breast cancer symposium in San Antonio, Tex.
How is that important to Amgen? The biotech company's blockbuster drug Neupogen, which helps chemotherapy patients fight off infection, was given to all the patients who received chemotherapy more frequently. "You cannot give dose-dense chemotherapy without Neupogen," says Marc Citron, a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Brookeville, N.Y. and one of the authors of the study.
All the women in Citron's study received a cocktail of cancer drugs, including Bristol-Myers Squibb's (nyse: BMY - news - people ) Taxol, Bristol-Myers' Cytoxan and Pharmacia's (nyse: PHA - news - people ) Adriamycin, all of which are available in generic forms. A control group of patients received their chemotherapy every three weeks, while the experimental group got it every two weeks. The patients who got the chemotherapy more often were less likely to see their cancer return.
All of these patients were given Neupogen if they needed it, but only those receiving chemotherapy every two weeks were given it all the time. The drug spurs the body to create more white blood cells, which can be destroyed during chemotherapy.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as we're concerned, because it doesn't just apply to breast cancer," says Amgen spokesman Michael Beckerich. "This aggressive kind of chemotherapy may work in other kinds of cancer."
At the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, Michael Pfreundschuh of Saarland University Medical School in Homburg, Germany presented similar data showing that closer dosing of chemotherapy was also helpful in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In Pfreundschuh's study, patients recieved Neupogen.
These studies could be important not only for sales of Neupogen, but also for Amgen's very similar follow-up drug Neulasta, which is longer lasting and easier to give. That's part of the reason Amgen's earnings are continuing to shoot up. Next year, combined sales of Neupogen and Neulasta are expected to reach $2.3 billion. In a note to investors this afternoon, RBC Capital Markets analyst Jennifer Chao listed increased sales of Neulasta. One significant driver: Higher dose therapies like the ones Citron studied.
Amgen looks to benefit from other clinical studies as well. One contender is a study presented by John Glaspy, a professor of medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles, at the ASH meeting. Glaspy showed that using Amgen's Aranesp was more cost-effective than Procrit, a competing drug from Johnson & Johnson (nyse: JNJ - news - people ).
Biotechnology companies in general have had a rough year. But for Amgen, the biggest and one of the oldest, things are only getting brighter. |
