Amgen has 6 cancer treatments in the pipeline
SAN FRANCISCO - Amgen Inc., the world's largest biotechnology company by sales, is developing six cancer drugs to help recover from a decline in its anemia products.
Amgen plunged 32 percent last year in Nasdaq trading after its top-selling anemia medicines, Aranesp and Epogen, were linked to risks of tumor growth and death. The company depends on the drugs for 41 percent of revenue.
The market for cancer drugs has doubled in the past four years, and will be worth $67 billion worldwide in 2012, according to research firm Decision Resources Inc. Amgen's anticancer undertaking is risky as about 95 percent of cancer drugs entering human tests fail to go to market, according to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Amgen will provide preliminary drug data, mostly from animal tests, next week.
"They are a bit late to the party," said Michael King, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw in New York. Amgen has "marketing muscle" that could help turn a new cancer drug into a sales success. "They're not going away, despite all their troubles," he said.
The six drug candidates are being tested in more than 30 clinical trials underway or planned, Amgen said.
The medicines are designed to attack tumors through three of the most popular approaches in cancer research. One drug, called AMG-386, cuts off blood flow to tumors like Genentech Inc.'s Avastin, which had $2.3 billion in US sales last year. The Amgen treatment is designed to block more proteins that lead to blood vessel formation than Avastin alone.
Data on the drugs' effectiveness in animals will be made public at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting that started yesterday in San Diego.
