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Biotech / Medical : Agouron Pharmaceuticals (AGPH)

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To: PAL who wrote (4238)5/6/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: Steve Fancy  Read Replies (1) of 6136
 
Agouron CEO:Sees More Than 1 Winner In Race Vs. Cancer

Dow Jones Newswires

NEW YORK -- The first biotechnogy company to get
an antiangiogenesis drug to market will not be the only
firm to benefit from the technology, said Peter Johnson,
Agouron Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AGPH) president and
chief executive.

"What I think is on the minds of anybody working in this
field is to deliever solutions to patients that have serious
problems with this rather grave disease," he said in an
interview on CNBC Wednesday. "And (in drug
development) it has almost never been a zero-sum game
in which there is a single winner and a single product that
represents all the solutions."

Agouron Pharmaceuticals said Tuesday it began Phase
II/III clinical trials of an anticancer agent in patients with
advanced lung or prostate cancer.

In a press release, Agouron said its matrix
metalloprotease inhibitor agent AG3340 inhibits
angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels
which feed growing tumors, in rodents and was
well-tolerated at doses that will be administered in Phase
II trials.

If all goes well in trial, Johnson said Agouron could have
a product on the market by 2000. But, just as with a
similiar drug developed by a British biotechnology
company, he concedes there may be concerns about
serious side effects.

"But, it's our hope in the compound that we have
designed ... that we may have designed our way around
some of those problems," he said.

It is also their hope that cancer may one day be treated
as chronic disease rather than an often-fatal one.

"I think there is room for cautious optimism that as
biology moves forward and is followed by ingenious
invention of new drugs that a new era of cancer therapy
is a possiblity," he said.

-By Charlene Oldham
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