Pharmaceuticals: Priceless pills

IN THE late 1800s a New York doctor noticed that getting an infection after surgery helped some cancer patients. So he began to treat cancer using infections and had a little success. But many doctors were sceptical of his work, and other treatments such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy eventually took off. Today, however, the pharmaceutical industry understands how his treatments would have worked and has placed a sizeable bet that immuno-oncology—the treatment of cancer using the body’s immune system—will yield breakthrough drugs.Earlier this month one of a promising new class of immuno-oncology drugs was approved for use in America by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Developed by Merck, pembrolizumab will be used to treat advanced melanoma, a skin cancer. Another American firm, Bristol-Myers Squibb, hopes to gain FDA approval soon for its melanoma treatment, nivolumab, which is already in use in Japan.Cancer cells have defences that stop the immune system from attacking them, but pembrolizumab and nivolumab are among an emerging category of drugs called “checkpoint inhibitors”, which overcome these defences by interacting with proteins on the surface of either cancer cells or the immune system’s T-cells.Four drugmakers in particular—AstraZeneca, Roche, Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb—are chasing new immuno-oncology medicines. Evidence has grown that some...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/Yd2tub