Good News Expected From Biotechs at Cancer Meeting
Thursday May 29, 5:46 pm ET
By Daniel Rosenberg and Otesa Middleton
Dow Jones Business News
CHICAGO -- Biotechnology stocks have rallied recently, which is no surprise considering that biotech companies' drugs -- both old and new -- are the drawing card for this weekend's major cancer conference in Chicago.
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The American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting starts Saturday and ends Tuesday, and biotech companies like Amgen Inc. (NasdaqNM:AMGN - News) , Genentech Inc. (NYSE:DNA - News) , Millennium Phamaceuticals Inc. and ImClone Systems Inc. (IMCLE) will present data on their cancer treatments. Investors must be hoping for good news, considering that the Amex Biotechnology Index (BTK) is up 36% since April 10 and is at its highest level in more than a year.
And five years after headlines hailed a cancer cure in lab mice, the mechanism behind the claims -- starving tumors of blood -- will be another hot topic.
Called anti-angiogenesis, cutting off the network of new blood vessels that feed cancerous growths, the treatment has been tested with a variety of experimental drugs and will be the subject of more than 80 studies.
It's not just the big biotech companies presenting important papers. Smaller firms such as Genta Inc. (NasdaqNM:GNTA - News) , Cell Genesys Inc. (NasdaqNM:CEGE - News) and Telik Inc. (NasdaqNM:TELK - News) also have data that doctors want to see, analysts said.
Big pharmaceutical companies won't be left out, of course. Abbott Laboratories (ABT) and Novartis AG will make important presentations, with much focus on Abbott's Atrasentan drug and Novartis' Gleevec. Still, biotech companies will get a good deal of the attention.
"Biotech is the home of innovation, and the drugs we're going to see highlighted at the meeting are from biotech," said Mark Monane, an analyst with Needham & Co.
(Mr. Monane doesn't own shares of any of the stocks mentioned, although his firm is seeking banking relationships with several of the companies.)
Cancer affects nearly 1.3 million new patients in the U.S. each year, and is the second leading cause of death after heart disease, according to the American Cancer Society. The ACS estimates that 550,000 people died of cancer in the U.S. last year, or more than 1,500 a day. To date, cancer drug therapies represent a $12 billion market opportunity, Mr. Monane said.
Treating Side Effects
This year's ASCO meeting theme is "Commitment, Care, Compassion, Honoring People with Cancer." That makes sense, said Michael Beckerich, an Amgen spokesman. He pointed out that many of the new drugs don't treat cancer itself, but treat the side effects caused by cancer drugs in the hopes of improving patients' quality of life and encouraging them to continue their cancer treatments.
"More patients are living longer," Mr. Beckerich said. "There are better survival rates. You need to treat the side effects so men and women can keep coming to work and taking care of their kids while dealing with this horrible cancer ravaging their body."
Anemia and infection, he said, are two of the worst side effects from chemotherapy, and companies like Amgen are still working on the best way to treat them.
Amgen will present data on two pipeline products at the meeting: KGF for treatment of mucositis -- a condition in which painful mouth ulcers develop due to chemotherapy; and ABX-EGF -- a drug that attacks specific tumors that cause lung, colorectal and renal cell cancer. Amgen also will present new data for its benchmark Aranesp drug for anemia, showing it can be taken less frequently and still be effective.
Anti-angiogenesis and targeted approaches to treating cancer are more appealing to doctors and patients alike, because they come with a promise of fewer side effects. Traditional chemotherapy attacks cancerous cells by killing all fast-dividing cells. These can be tumor cells, but unfortunately hair follicles, cells that line the stomach and bone-marrow cells also multiply rapidly.
One cell-starving drug that will get discussed is thalidomide, originally used in the 1960s as a morning-sickness drug that led to severe birth defects in other countries. More than two dozen studies on thalidomide will delve into the drug as part of combination therapy and its use in various cancers.
Novartis also plans to divulge data on its early-stage compound PTK787 and its already approved drug Zometa. These drugs inhibit VEG-F, or vascular endothelial growth factor, the hormone responsible for developing blood vessels.
"Excitement around this category of medicine has waxed and waned over years," said David Epstein, president of Novartis oncology. "Early on in angiogenesis research, it was the top candidate as the next big thing. However, it has taken a few years to get a large pool of data.
"It takes a while to design really good drugs and to put the right drugs together. We will see a lot about angiogenesis."
Genentech's Avastin A Hot Topic
Another product that will draw attention at the meeting is Avastin, a drug made by Genentech. The company recently wowed investors with data showing the drug works well against colon cancer. Some analysts think the drug, if approved by the Food and Drug Administration (News - Websites), could be a blockbuster with revenue of more than $1 billion a year.
"Avastin is big time," said Dr. Martin Murphy, executive editor of The Oncologist, a research journal.
He added that there will be "a whole spate of papers" presented about Gleevec, a Novartis drug. It's being tested on prostate cancer, Kaposi's Sarcoma and carcinoid tumors, among other diseases. The drug is already approved for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), but has the potential to work in other cancers as well.
"It takes patients who were dying of CML leukemia out of the hospice and puts them back on the tennis court," Murphy said.
Another biotech drug in the spotlight is Millennium's Velcade, which recently got FDA approval for treatment of the rare blood cancer multiple myeloma. Millennium has clinical trials testing the drug in a wide range of tumors, including as a single agent in fighting lung and kidney cancer. The company also has trials testing Velcade against ovarian and breast cancer, and the drug is in Phase III trials for multiple myeloma.
"Velcade represents a whole new approach to fighting cancer, a novel mechanism not used by other drugs," said Dr. David Schenkein, vice president for clinical oncology at Millennium. "It targets a complex within the cell that cancer cells are dependent on. By turning off this system, the cancer cell can't survive and goes into cell death."
Another targeted therapy expected to make news at ASCO is ImClone's Erbitux. ImClone -- which lost its top executives to allegations of insider trading and tax evasion and which had Erbitux turned down by the FDA for an incomplete application -- may have a ray of hope if its German partner Merck KGaA releases positive Erbitux data as promised. |
