Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1095
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
AstraZeneca cancer drug linked to 69 new deaths
Reuters 2003 May 2
Full text:
The firm said that, according to the Japanese health ministry, the total number of people who had died after taking Iressa had risen to 246, and that some 616 patients had suffered side effects since the drug’s introduction in July 2002.
However, a spokeswoman also said the proportion of patients developing interstitial lung disease — a potentially deadly condition linked to Iressa — had “plateaued” and that the Japanese health ministry continued to back the medicine.
Iressa is given to seriously ill people for whom other anti-cancer therapies have failed.
The drug is one of a number of potential blockbusters that AstraZeneca hopes will make up for declining sales of ulcer pill Losec, sold as Prilosec in the United States, which is now facing cheap, copycat competition.
But its prospects have been clouded by the series of deaths in Japan and revenues from the drug in that country fell to $19 million in the first quarter of this year from $41 million in the last three months of 2002.
An advisory panel at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) backed Iressa in September as a last resort treatment for advanced lung cancer, and the regulator is expected to make a final ruling by Monday.
AstraZeneca received a boost on Thursday when Australia become the second country to back the sale of the drug.
But on the same day a U.S. consumer group, Public Citizen, said Iressa was “likely ineffective and dangerous” and should not be approved in the world’s biggest market for medicines.
Iressa is a pill designed to shrink tumours without the side-effects of chemotherapy and belongs to a new family of drugs known as epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors, which caused great excitement among cancer specialists when they were first discovered.
Sales prospects suffered a setback last year, however, when Iressa failed to work in trials combining it with other drugs.
Iressa’s initial use is for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who have previously received chemotherapy. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, and about 80 percent of cases are non-small cell lung cancer.
Longer-term, AstraZeneca also hopes the drug will have a role in the treatment of other cancers.
At 1005 GMT, the Anglo-Swedish firm’s shares were 0.8 percent higher at 2,479 pence.
