Prostate Cancer Market | Biotech Strategy Blog

Prostate Cancer Market to expand from $1B to $5B by 2015

The market for prostate cancer therapies is set to expand from $1 billion currently to $5 billion by 2015, according to analysts reported by this morning’s Washington Post/Bloomberg news. This is perhaps no surprise given the recent approval of abiraterone acetate (Zytiga®) from Ortho Biotech (JNJ).

New clinical data on prostate cancer clinical trial results is expected at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago this weekend from many of the prostate cancer therapies in development such as MDV3100, TAK700, ARN-509, cabozantinib (XL184), ipilimumab, custirsen (OGX-11), BPX-101, alpharadin, denosumab (Xgeva®) and Prostvac-VF.

Indeed, one could argue that prostate cancer is becoming a competitive marketplace. Any emerging biotechnology company that is not already developing a prostate cancer drug is likely to find it a hard market in which to create a blockbuster. By the time any drug comes to market, there will be incumbents with effective products who have captured market share.

Prostate cancer is an exciting market to watch from a marketing strategy and patient perspective, as several companies potentially bring new products to market over the next few years.

However, the bottom line is that patients will live longer as a result of all the innovation that is taking place. Not only that but physician education and awareness of how to treat this disease is also likely to improve as they seek out knowledge on new therapies and treatments. This to many will make a major difference. At the recent American Urological Association (AUA) annual meeting, the sessions on treatment of prostate cancer were standing room only. There is clearly a demand for knowledge out there as the treatment paradigms change.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is also innovation taking place in terms of improved diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer. Whether we should screen all men for PSA remains a controversial topic, although use of risk calculators do appear to offer less false positives. Indeed, calculating risk is going to be one of the key areas that primary care physicians and urologists need to focus on, particularly in the light of the PIVOT trial data that was presented at AUA, showing radical prostatectomy (with risks including incontinence and erectile dysfunction) was not better than watchful waiting in low-risk, early stage disease.

However, a presentation I am looking forward to at ASCO 2011 is on circulating tumor cells (CTC) and whether these can be a prognostic or even a predictive biomarker. Both the phase III MDV3100 and abiraterone acetate clinical trials captured CTC data. It will be exciting news at ASCO 2011 if circulating tumor cells that require only a blood sample offer an improvement over PSA not only for detection of prostate cancer, but in monitoring the disease over time.

I will be at ASCO 2011 this weekend, and look forward to writing more on prostate cancer from the conference!

AUA 2011 Results from PIVOT study show no benefit from radical prostatectomy in low risk early stage prostate patients

Data from the Prostate Cancer Intervention versus Observation Study (PIVOT) presented today in the plenary session of the 2011 annual meeting of American Urological Association (AUA) will have a major impact on the practice of Urology.

The VA/NCI/AHRQ cooperative study, initiated in 1994, was designed to assess the effect of radical prostatectomy (RP) compared to observation only or “watchful waiting” in men with localized prostate cancer.

What makes the PIVOT study so important is that it is the first randomized trial in the United States to look at RP versus “watchful waiting.” In all, 13,022 men were screened at 52 US centers, from which 5023 men were deemed eligible. Surprisingly, 4292 declined randomization and 731 men were enrolled in the trial.

The primary endpoint was all-cause mortality and the secondary endpoint, Prostate Cancer (PCa) mortality. The two groups of patients were comparable between the observation and RP groups (mean age 66.8, 67.0 years); PSA Mean (10.2, 10.1), Gleason Score < 6 (70.1%, 69.8%).

Timothy Wilt (Minnesota) presented the results today at AUA 2011 (Abstract#407)

All-Cause Mortality

Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) between Observation & RP = 2.9%,
Hazard Ratio = 0.88 (95% 0.71-1.08), P=0.22

Prostate Cancer Mortality – all patients

AR = 2.7% (95% CI -1.3 to 6.2)
Hazard Ratio=0.63 (95% CI 0.36-1.09), p=0.09

In other words looking at the groups as a whole there was no benefit of RP on survival. Wilt presented further analysis on subgroups with low-risk local pathology, intermediate risk-local pathology and high risk PSA>10.

Only in the high-risk groups (PSA>10) was there a significant benefit to RP, in terms of lowering Prostate Cancer Mortality.

HR= 0.36 (0.15 to 0.89); p=0.03
ARR = 7.2% (0 to 14.8)

Wilt’s conclusion from the data was that compared to observation, RP produced

“reductions in all-cause and prostate cancer mortality that were not significant and less than 3% in absolute terms over 12 years.”

He added that:

“Surgery did not reduce mortality more than observation in men with low PSA or low risk from Prostate Cancer”

However, these “results suggest a benefit from surgery in men with higher PSA or higher risk of disease.”

The PIVOT trial provides evidence-based medicine results that will directly influence how urologists treat early stage prostate cancer. Several urologists and others at AUA tweeted about the PIVOT data. Using Storify, these provide some sentiments and perspective from practicing urologists in the live audience.

The conclusion from this data is that low risk, early stage prostate cancer patients should be observed by “watchful waiting” rather than undergo radical prostatectomy (RP). This may have a financial impact on urologists who previously may have favored RP in low risk patients.

Update May 23, 2011

A webcast with audio and slides of Dr Wilt’s plenary presentation of the PIVOT data is now available on the AUA website.

Update March 6, 2012

Dr Wilt presented an update on the PIVOT trial at the 2012 European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris. You can read my blog post from the meeting:

“PIVOT data continues to show no survival benefit for prostatectomy over watchful waiting in men with low to medium risk early prostate cancer.”

Update July 18, 2012

The data from the PIVOT trial presented in the plenary sessions at AUA 2011 and EAU 2012 has finally been published online first (July 18, 2012) in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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AUA 2011 European men with a biochemical recurrence have a lower prostate cancer survival compared to the United States

One of the sessions that I attended at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) focused on research into advanced prostate cancer. A particularly thought provoking presentation was:

Time trends of biochemical recurrence (BCR) following radical prostatectomy (RP) among 1574 BCR patients (Abstract #639)

Presented by Alex Haese from Hamburg, Germany, this paper was a retrospective analysis of 1,574 patients who had a biochemical recurrence (PSA > 0.2 mg/dl) following RP. Researchers looked at clinical progression and cancer specific survival rates and compared their findings to published United States data.

The results appeared to be somewhat depressing for European patients who experience a BCR, with a time to BCR of 1.8 years, compared to 2.1 years in the US research by Pound from Johns Hopkins and 2.4 years in the data published by Hull, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

Once a BCR is experienced, the time to metastases is faster in Europe, 4.7 years in the research presented by Haese at AUA, as compared to 8 years in US research by Pound. Risk factors for metastasis free survival include time to BCR i.e.

“The longer the interval between RP and BCR, the greater the probability of being met-free.”

In other words delaying time to progression is associated with longer survival.

Following BCR, time to Prostate Cancer death was 6.0 years in the 1,574 European patients, compared to 13 years in the US Pound research. Again, the data presented showed that,

“The longer the interval between RP and BCR, the greater the probability of being alive.”

This research must be put into context, as metastasis and death in BCR patients are rare (92% of the 1,574 patients with BCR were free of metastases at 5 years, 81% at 10 years). However, for those patients who did progress, the results appear significantly different between the US and Europe.

What could explain this?

The presentation left this question unanswered, although in Q&A it was briefly touched upon. One person raised the question of whether differences in screening could be the difference in Europe vs. US?

Other questions that come to mind are whether the subject populations in the Hull and Pound data were comparable. The German data also had more patients (1574) compared to 304 in the Pound research and 147 (Hull) raising the question that the larger sample size may be more accurate data?

Other factors that might possibly explain the difference include:

Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT)
Radiotherapy
Supportive care (eg bisphosphonates)

All of which tend to be more aggressively pursued as treatment options in the USA.

Overall, this presentation raised the interesting question of US/European differences in Prostate Cancer progression that hopefully will be answered by future research.

AUA 2011 New Prostate Cancer products in development beyond the androgen axis

There is a lot of focus at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) here in Washington DC on metastatic castrate resistant Prostate Cancer (mCRPC), and the recently FDA approved adrenal steroid inhibitor, abiraterone acetate (Zytiga®).

Drugs in development that target the androgen receptor, such as MDV3100, are also generating a lot of interest from urologists.

However, Oliver Sartor (Tulane) in the Saturday morning satellite symposia that I attended, focused on emerging therapies in CRPC, beyond the androgen axis. His hypothesis:

“Cancers are devious and some of the mechanisms of AR activation appear to be ligand-independent and resistant to all current androgen-axis targeted therapies.”

What this means is that focusing on adrenal steroid inhibition or blocking the androgen receptor may not be sufficient to prevent disease progression. If we are looking for a Prostate Cancer cure, then will it take multiple drugs, including those that target various stromal sites? That is the intriguing question that Sartor raised.

Indeed, if there is one take home from this meeting, it is that the “desert” of prostate cancer therapies has now blossomed into a multiplicity of potential new therapies and development, which will mean that urologists and oncologists will soon be spoilt for choice as abiraterone and MDV3100 are not the end of the story.

Sartor highlighted some interesting ones on the horizon to watch out for:

Alpharadin: This is a bone targeted therapy that uses radioactive Radium 223 to kill cancer cells. It is being developed by Norwegian company, Algeta in partnership with Bayer Schering Pharma AG. The 900 patient phase III trial completed accrual earlier this year in Jan 2011. Phase II data was published in the Lancet in 2007 by Nilsson et al. Data from alpharadin will be “coming soon” according to Sartor.

XL-184 (cabozantinib): Activated MET is highly expressed in prostate bone metastases. Exelixis XL-184 is a small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor that specifically inhibits both MET and VEGFR2.

Data from a phase 2 study of XL-184 in castrate resistance patients was presented last year at the EORTC-AACR-NCI Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Berlin by David Smith et al (Abstract 406).

Both XL-184 and alpharadin would be potential competitors to Amgen’s denosumab (Xgeva®).

Other new products in development “Beyond the Androgen Axis” that Dr. Sartor mentioned included Prostvac-VF, BPX-101 and ipilimumab. A phase III trial of ipilimumab, both pre- and post- docetaxel is now underway in mCRPC. A phase III trial of Prostvac-VF will start later this year with 1200 patients in a placebo controlled study with minimally symptomatic, castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer patients.

Over the next few years a lot of data may emerge on exciting new treatment options. Coupled with the basic research that is going on, tremendous progress in the treatment of Prostate Cancer is already taking place.

According to Sartor “multiple drugs will be necessary to cure mCRPC and that is our greatest challenge today.” Major progress is now being made towards this.

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American Urological Association Annual Meeting 2011 Satellite Symposia

By Pieter Droppert on May 12, 2011

I am off to Washington DC tomorrow for the annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA).

If you are not able to attend, then you can follow the Twitter coverage on Pharma Strategy Blog where Sally Church (@MaverickNY) will be aggregating the tweets. The conference hashtag is #AUA2011. I also expect to be live-tweeting from the conference.

Like many medical conferences in the United States, the AUA meeting kicks off with independent continuing medical education (CME) satellite symposia on topics of interest.

As a lawyer who has to pay for his own continuing legal education (CLE) credits, I have to confess that I am somewhat cynical that other professionals such as physicians expect to have their CME paid for through free industry-sponsored events. These symposia are certainly not cheap to run.

However, compared with Europe, CME events in the United States are usually well-produced and fair balanced, albeit with a topical theme that obviously relates to the sponsor’s interest.

The two satellite symposia that I will be attending at AUA are Friday evening’s Amgen supported “Managing Skeletal-Related Events in Patients with Prostate Cancer” and the Saturday morning Astellas/Medivation supported “Reason for Hope: Key Advances in the Management of Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer.”

While at Quintiles, I was lead CRA/European Project Manager for the phase III trial trial of risedronate in elderly women at risk of hip fracture, so I am interested in bone related treatments, and am looking forward to hearing more about denosumab (Xgeva®) and its impact on skeletal related events (SRE).

Oliver Sartor (Tulane) raises some excellent questions in a recent paper published in the Asian Journal of Andrology, “if a patient has a SRE, does it affect the way a patient feels, functions or survives?”

Sartor argues that a better definition of the benefit a drug has on SRE’s would be “a reduction in pain, analgesic consumption or improvement in quality of life (QoL)” instead of the current “feel, function or survive” standard.

He notes that patients with bone-metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) have a limited life expectancy, so that QoL is a key issue. “An asymptomatic event linked to a future adverse event is less meaningful in a patient with metastatic CRPC.”

Sartor concluded his paper by saying:

“The lack of effect of bisphosphonates or denosumab on patient-reported outcomes including QoL, pain or analgesic consumption continues to be a disappointment for this entire field.”

When we talk about a reduction in SRE’s what does this really mean for the patient? I look forward to hearing what the expert panel at Friday evening’s symposia on this topic and hope it will be addressed.

Moving on to the other satellite symposium, supported by Medivation/Astellas, that I will be attending early on Saturday morning. I expect this symposium will focus on new drugs in the pipeline such as MDV3011 and ARN-509 that target the androgen receptor. Hopefully they will also discuss other therapeutics, such as the recently approved abiraterone acetate (Zytiga®), as well TAK-700, which has a similar mechanism of action to abiraterone, i.e. they both inhibit CYP17 and testosterone production.

I’m looking forward to hearing what the expert panel has to say about the need to take prednisone with abiraterone, and whether there are any issues surrounding long-term usage if abiraterone ends up being used earlier in the pre-chemotherapy setting. Updated data from the COU-AA-301 trial will be presented at AUA on Monday, and I expect a lot of interest from urologists in this.

The satellite symposia are set to be a good warm up act to the start of the main AUA meeting that runs from May 14 to 19 in Washington DC. I’ll be writing more from the AUA 2011 over the next few days.

Sartor, O. (2011). Denosumab in bone-metastatic prostate cancer: known effects on skeletal-related events but unknown effects on quality of life Asian Journal of Andrology DOI: 10.1038/aja.2011.33

Update from AACR on new prostate cancer drugs to watch

By Pieter Droppert on April 7, 2011

The 102nd Annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) ended yesterday in Orlando, and it was only the diehards who kept going till the last session of the last day for an update on “Novel Androgen Receptor Antagonists.”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a lot of excitement in the prostate cancer field at the moment with three new therapies approved last year (cabazitaxel, sipuleucel-T, denosumab), and more expected over the next two years (abiraterone acetate, MDV3100, cabozantinib/XL-184).

What I took from the AACR session I attended, is that there are also other products in the pipeline that are worth watching. Below is a list of some of the products that were mentioned. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive review of the prostate cancer landscape, only my notes and thoughts on some of the new products that the speakers touched upon.

Abiraterone Acetate: The postive phase III trial results were reported last year at ESMO and ASCO GU, and the approval of this drug is currently being considered by the FDA. Approval is expected shortly, and possibly in time for launch at the forthcoming annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) meeting in Washington, DC.

Abiraterone (brand name Zytiga) inhibits the enzymes (17-alpha hydroxylase and C17, 20 lyase) responsible for adrenal androgen formation.

The phase III results were impressive in very sick patients who were close to the end of their lives in very advanced disease. Overall survival increased from 10.9 to 14.8 months in the second line chemotherapy setting post docetaxel. It’s expected that the results will be more dramatic pre-chemotherapy.

Once the FDA approval is obtained, it’s hard to see how oncologists will not consider abiraterone instead of cabazitaxel in the second-line chemotherapy setting. An easily taken pill with fewer less side effects may be a more convenient option for elderly or frail men with prostate cancer. Abiraterone’s approval will not be good news for sanofi-aventis.

I also expect we will see significantly off-label usage of abiraterone pre-chemotherapy by urologists as they seek to maintain hormone-sensitivity in their patients after several lines of anti-hormonal therapies. There is a phase III trial ongoing in this setting that is expected to show promising data by the end of the year.

However, it’s a good strategy to come market as soon as possible to provide wider access to patients in need, and the post-docetaxel second line setting allowed the overall survival benefit to be shown before the pre-chemo data would be available.

However, what I learned at the meeting is that abiraterone acetate may not be the best product in the long term. Currently it requires the corticosteroid, prednisone, to be given at the same time to attenuate the mineralocorticoid effects. Questions that were raised in the AACR session about long-term treatment with abiraterone included, “Must a corticosteroid be given concurrently?” and “What about hypertension?”

Other questions remain, such as possible development of resistance to abiraterone. Often the first drug to market is not the best, and it’s possible that second generation new products in the pipeline may be better than abiraterone and delay the time to resistance further.

However, what abiraterone does have is first mover advantage and depending on the pricing strategy adopted by Johnson & Johnson, the ability to capture market share earlier. It will be interesting to see what happens with this drug, but it’s certainly an exciting time for patients with prostate cancer.

TAK-700: This drug from Takeda/Millennium is a more potent inhibitor of C17α-hydroxylase than abiraterone. One of the panelists at AACR believed that TAK-700 “may in the long run surplant abiraterone acetate due to less need for mineralocorticoids.” TAK 700 entered phase III clinical trials late last year.

MDV3100: This drug is being developed by Medivation/Astellas and is also in phase III trials, with data expected by the end of this year or early 2012. It has a high affinity for the androgen receptor. However, what came across in the AACR presentation by Howard Scher, was his view that the second compound developed by Charles Sawyers, ARN-509 may be better than MDV3100.

ARN-509: This drug from Aragon Pharmaceuticals is in phase I/II clinical trials and is definitely one to watch. As Dr Scher pointed out, ARN-509 is more potent than MDV3100 and I expect we will see publication of more data on ARN-509 in the near future.

If you are interested in prostate cancer, AACR are offering webcasts and podcasts of scientific sessions this year. Further information can be found on their website. AACR have also announced a scientific special session on “Advances in Prostate Cancer Research” from February 6-9 2012. It’s certainly an interesting and exciting time in this field as new products become available, something that is likely to make a real difference to how this disease is treated.

Engrailed-2 (EN2) may be a new biomarker for the early detection of Prostate Cancer

By Pieter Droppert on March 7, 2011

One of the challenges with cancer is being able to detect the disease early enough for effective treatment. The staging or progression of the cancer at time of diagnosis is correlated with 5 year overall survival (OS) rates. Biomarkers that may be expressed by a cancer are, therefore, potentially useful for diagnosis and monitoring of treatment.

There is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of prostate specific antigen (PSA) as a biomarker for early detection of Prostate Cancer (PC). As Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog discusses, PSA measurements can offer false positives and up to 75% of men have a negative biopsy. There is clearly a need for alternatives to PSA measurements.

In the March 1, 2011 online edition of Clinical Cancer Research (a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, AACR), Richard Morgan and colleagues from the Postgraduate Medical School at the University of Surrey in Guildford, assessed the potential of the Engrailed-2 (EN2) protein as a prognostic biomarker for PC.

Their research found that EN2 is secreted into the urine of men with PC (92%, n=104), but does not appear in the urine of those without PC (0%, n=11). Presence of EN2 in the urine showed a 66% sensitivity for the detection of PC without a digital rectal exam (DRE) when compared to biopsy findings of those with confirmed PC (54 of 82 men). The specificity of the test is almost 90%, i.e. it can pick out men with prostate cancer versus those without cancer.

Interestingly, there was no correlation between serum PSA levels and the presence or absence of EN2. EN2 is measured in small quantities of unprocessed urine (100μl) by means of a simple enzymatic assay.

The investigators state in their paper that a multicenter clinical trial is planned to investigate whether EN2 measurements can be used as a tool for monitoring disease progression after hormonal treatment, radiotherapy or surgery.

However, despite the promising preliminary results in this paper, it is still too early to say whether EN2 will evolve into a clinically useful predictive biomarker for PC. The fact that EN2 was secreted in patients with non-PSA secreting PC, raises the possibility that it might have a diagnostic role to play in combination with other biomarkers.

EN2 has also been shown to be an oncogene in breast cancer, so it will be interesting to see if there is any further information presented at the forthcoming AACR annual meeting from April 2 to 6 in Orlando.

I recommend reading Pharma Strategy Blog for further insight on cancer biomarkers.

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