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Biotech / Medical : Agouron Pharmaceuticals (AGPH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PAL who wrote (4238)	5/6/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: Steve Fancy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to 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