Drug-Treatment Opportunities in Advanced Ovarian Cancer Will be Limited by a Reduced Risk of Disease Recurrence and an Only Modest Increase in Incidence

BURLINGTON, Mass., Dec. 8, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that projected improvements in recurrence-free survival and an only modest increase in risk due to population aging will limit growth of new drug-treatment opportunities for advanced ovarian cancer. According to analysis of Pharmacor Patient Flow Model Ovarian Cancer, the number of cases eligible for first-line drug-treatment of advanced disease will be limited to 16 percent growth from 2009 to 2024.

"While the effect of population aging tends to increase the number of incident cases of ovarian cancer, we project a slight decrease in age-adjusted risk which will reduce the total number of incident cases from what they would have otherwise been," said Decision Resources Principal Epidemiologist Michael Hughes. "Moreover, although we forecast a slight increase in the proportion of patients diagnosed with non-metastatic advanced disease, we also expect a decrease in the percentage of patients diagnosed with metastatic disease. We also forecast some increases – particularly in the U.S. - in the uptake of adjuvant drug therapy. Altogether, these factors will result in a reduced number of recurrent cases."

Analysis of the patient flow model also finds that population aging will increase the number of newly diagnosed incident cases by 15 percent from 2009 to 2024, although the number of recurrent cases per year will decrease by 8 percent over the same period.

The findings are derived from Decision Resources' Pharmacor Patient Flow Models which utilize Decision Resources proprietary suite of epidemiological models. With Pharmacor Patient Flow Models, users can build their own oncology patient flow model and/or validate the assumptions behind their own internal models. This interactive tool allows users to track changing disease and population dynamics over a 15-year annualized forecast, improve their modeling accuracy with clearly depicted methods and transparent assumptions and identify untapped market potential within lines of therapy. Pharmacor Patient Flow Models is available as an add-on product to the Pharmacor advisory service.

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SOURCE Decision Resources