Itsallaguess wrote:Bouleversee wrote:HYPMonkey wrote:Minded to sell AZN on cancer drug news.
What cancer drug news?
Presumably this RNS released earlier this morning -
AstraZeneca and MSD Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., US (MSD: known as Merck & Co., Inc. inside the US and Canada) today announced that the European Commission (EC) has approved Lynparza (olaparib) as a 1st-line maintenance treatment for women with BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer.
Does anyone here have any idea how common "BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer" is, and among women who suffer from it, how common it is to try to treat it by "1st-line maintenance treatment"? It makes a tremendous difference to the significance of this news, and I for one have no idea about the answers or how to obtain reasonably authoritative answers... And actually, that form of the qualifications seems to be the simplified version - if one reads on in the
RNS, one finds that "
The licensed indication is as a maintenance treatment of adult patients with advanced (FIGO stages III and IV) BRCA1/2-mutated (germline and/or somatic) high-grade epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancer who are in response (complete or partial) following completion of 1st-line platinum-based chemotherapy."...
Just to be clear, I am
not asking how common ovarian cancer is or whether it's a significant medical problem - I'm certain it is, both for those affected by it personally and for the NHS and other health care funding. What I am asking is whether the qualifying words "BRCA-mutated" and "advanced" and the extra qualification about the type of treatment mean that the newly-approved drug is likely to make major inroads into that problem or just nibble at its edges - which clearly makes a big difference to how major an impact it will have on AstraZeneca's fortunes.
This is in general the problem I have as a HYP investor with trying to take account of such announcements from the pharmaceuticals companies: there are quite a lot of them, and judging the significance of each to the company's fortunes would be a non-trivial chunk of work for me. E.g. there are another three today, including one for the same drug in Japan rather than Europe that has significantly different wording, so that I would need more time than I have available right now to judge whether it deals with essentially the same part of the ovarian cancer problem and if not, whether it's a significantly larger chunk of it, a significantly smaller chunk, or a different but similarly-sized chunk... Trying to track how well the company is doing by analysing such announcements could easily become a full-time job or a major fraction of one - for just
one of the companies in my HYP! For me, that's not a practical way to achieve my HYP's aims, which include
not consuming a large fraction of my available time (because I have plenty of other, more interesting uses for it...).
Gengulphus