GWM, Viagra is a 5 billion drug, because there are 30 million afflicted (US only) and they will be using (if the third party payors have their way), 6 pills per month, or $720 a year. If you assume that eventually 25% of the target population for VIAGRA will use it you can see the $5 Bill. Cancer is a much smaller population (excluding skin cancer) of less than 1 MM new cases each year, each one affecting different parts of the body, and some (like leukemia, various lymphoma, and pancreatic cancer) are probably not candidates for ENMD's pair of drugs (in very simple terms, the drugs act to block blood supply to the growing cancer). AIDS drugs also took much longer than 5 years to go through the process, and now that they have tri-cocktails, new drugs against AIDS are finding it much more difficult to go through the barriers. In the case of cancers, the FDA approach is to try everything else first and only the terminal patients are given new experimental modalities, in accelerated programs. I think that ENMD has an extremely interesting and promising route to fight cancer, but it is not yet a magic bullet. In their news release today, ENMD stated that Phase I clinical trials will not start for at least 12 to 18 months.
Zeev |
