Population Aging, Increasing Risk of Recurrence Following Resection and Modest Improvements in Survival Will Result in a Greater Number of Drug Treatment Opportunities for Pancreatic Cancer

BURLINGTON, Mass., Nov. 17, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds significant trends in multiple epidemiological parameters to be driving the increase in drug-treatment opportunities for pancreatic cancer over the period 2009 to 2024, including population aging, increasing risk of recurrence following resection and modest improvements in survival. According to analysis of Pharmacor Patient Flow Models Pancreatic Cancer, additional parameters include incidence, prevalence and the percentage of prevalent cases eligible for drug-treatment.

Population aging will result in an increased risk of pancreatic cancer over time, as well as an increased risk of recurrence in patients treated by resection. Changes to both of these parameters over time will combine to result in an increased number of drug-treatment opportunities over the period 2009 to 2024.

Despite the increasing risk of disease recurrence and mortality risk from other causes with age, life expectancy following diagnosis with pancreatic cancer will increase modestly over the period 2009 to 2024. In the case of resected disease, average life expectancy following diagnosis will increase from 2.6 years to 2.9 years, and for disease that is unresected from 0.6 years to 0.7 years. This increased survival will result in a disproportionate increase in the prevalent population, and the prevalent population eligible for drug-treatment in particular which will increase by 58 percent over the forecast 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 are available as add-ons to the Pharmacor advisory service.

"Pharmacor Patient Flow Models help market research teams at pharmaceutical companies generate robust estimates of epidemiological and market populations for oncology indications and track changes in population dynamics, survival and disease recurrence over time," said Michael Hughes, Ph.D., principal epidemiologist with Decision Resources. "The interactivity of the tool allows users to graph and trend numerous epidemiological parameters across the seven major mature pharmaceutical markets over a 15-year period."

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SOURCE Decision Resources