The First-Line Pancreatic Cancer Patient Population Will Experience A Dynamic Change in Treatment Practice Due to Increased Uptake of FOLFIRINOX and the Launch of Abraxane

BURLINGTON, Mass., Nov. 17, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds although the pancreatic cancer drug market will remain relatively flat through 2019 in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and Japan, the first-line patient population will experience a dynamic change in treatment practice owing to increased uptake of the cytotoxic regimen, FOLFIRINOX* and the approval and launch of Celgene's Abraxane as an add-on to Eli Lilly's Gemzar.

The Pharmacor 2010 findings from the topic entitled Pancreatic Cancer reveal that, despite changes in treatment practice, the current standard of care for the disease -- Gemzar -- will remain the market leader through 2019, even though it has suffered generic erosion in Europe since 2009 and will lose patent protection this year in the United States. Sales erosion of Gemzar will be counterbalanced by the introduction of FOLFIRINOX and Abraxane as an adjunct to Gemzar for a subset of pancreatic cancer patients eligible for first-line treatment.

The findings also reveal that the pancreatic cancer therapies market has seen little successful drug development in the past decade, as evidenced by the failure of numerous agents following disappointing Phase III clinical trial outcomes. Most notably, Roche/Genentech/Chugai's Avastin failed to significantly improve overall survival in pancreatic cancer patients, as did Sanofi-Aventis/Regeneron's aflibercept and Pfizer's axitinib. In addition, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Eli Lilly/ImClone Systems/Merck KGaA's Erbitux has also not met expectations. The plethora of late-stage drug failures highlights the urgent need for more effective therapies for pancreatic cancer treatment.

"The poor results of the antiangiogenesis drug class, amongst others, have made oncologists highly skeptical about the effectiveness of targeting this pathway in pancreatic cancer," said Decision Resources Analyst Rachel Webster, D.Phil. "Thought leaders we interviewed are hopeful that newly identified, more relevant targets will become the focus of industry research in the years ahead."

*FOLFIRINOX: 5-fluorouracil (5-FU, generics], leucovorin (folinic acid, generics), irinotecan (Pfizer's Camptosar/Campto, Daiichi Sankyo's Topotecin, Yakult Honsha's Campto, generics) and oxaliplatin (Sanofi-Aventis's Eloxatin/Eloxatine, Yakult Honsha's Elplat, generics.)

About Pharmacor Patient Flow Models

By utilizing our proprietary Pharmacor epidemiological data, Decision Resources provides Pharmacor Patient Flow Models covering pancreatic cancer, renal cell carcinoma and ovarian cancer. Using 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.

About Decision Resources

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SOURCE Decision Resources