Profiting from Novel Drug-Delivery Systems
By Chris Wood, Senior Analyst
caseyresearch.com
Traditional chemotherapy is nonspecific; it poisons a broad range of healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. That's a lot of collateral damage. ADCs, on the other hand, link monoclonal antibodies to potent cell-killing drugs and deliver these targeted anti-cancer agents just to the tumor cells, where enzymes cause the cell-killing drug to be released.
The technology represents the next promising wave of cancer therapeutics, combining the best characteristics of antibodies and chemotherapy into one. It's killing cancer with a smart bomb.
The key components of SGEN's ADC technology are:
- Stable, enzyme-cleavable linkers that join the cytotoxic drug to the antibody. Like a strong chemical bond with a quick-release mechanism, SGEN's novel linker systems have been shown to be up to 10 times more stable in the bloodstream than conventional means of attaching drugs to antibodies. They are designed to release the potent cell-killing agent only after they're inside the targeted cancer cells, thus minimizing damage to surrounding healthy cells.
Actual cell-killing agents. SGEN has developed a class of cytotoxic compounds called auristatins, which are 100 to 1,000 times more potent than traditional chemotherapy drugs. These drugs are far too toxic to be released willy-nilly into the body. But they become a viable treatment due to the selectivity of monoclonal antibodies and the stable linkers developed by SGEN to bond the drug to its antibody counterpart, where it is inactive until it reaches the targeted cancer cell. It's important to note that since both the linker and cell-killing agents are synthetic, SGEN’s ADC technology is readily scalable, representing an improvement over organic drug systems that can be far more challenging and expensive to produce.
What's also quite important is that SGEN's technology is already proven. In August 2011, SGEN's drug Adcetris became the first ADC drug to receive FDA approval. The drug, which is approved to treat Hodgkin lymphoma and systemic anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (ALCL), is expected to bring in about $135 million in net product sales for the full year 2012 and provide strong growth going forward with new future labels and expansion globally. |
