Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2208

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

Boseley S.
Tobacco giant buys rights to lung cancer drugs
The Age 2001 Nov 13
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/nov/12/cancercare

Full text:

One of the world’s biggest tobacco companies aims to make billions of dollars from diseases caused by cigarettes through deals with biotech companies for exclusive rights to future lung cancer vaccines.

The plan by Japan Tobacco, which makes Camel, Winston, Mild Seven and Salem, was condemned on Sunday as cynical and dangerous. If a successful lung cancer vaccine was found, it would not stop smokers dying of other tobacco-related diseases. But such a vaccine, promoted by a tobacco company, could encourage smoking.

“Giving a tobacco company exclusive rights to lung cancer vaccines is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank,” said Helen Wallace, deputy director of GeneWatch UK, which uncovered the deals.

She is worried that one of the biotech companies, Seattle-based Corixa Corp, aims to patent human lung cancer gene sequences, which may have come from a smoker unaware of the commercial prospects his genes offered.

Derek Yach, director of the non-communicable diseases cluster at the World Health Organisation, said: “We tackle lung cancer by breaking the addictive grip of the tobacco industry and taking action to help people quit smoking or never start. The last company that should control the rights to a lung cancer vaccine is one that makes huge profits from products that cause the disease.”

Japan Tobacco has paid Corixa for an exclusive licence to develop and sell vaccine and antibody-based products that prevent or treat lung cancer.

The idea is to use certain proteins in lung cancer tumors to generate an immune response in the patient.

The other contract, with California-based Cell Genesys, was signed in late 1998.

Japan Tobacco has also invested in UK company British Biotech, which is working on a genetically engineered protein that can dissolve and prevent blood clots and may help prevent heart attacks and strokes.