He says that Pfizer's top brass "see the potential" of the new anti-cancer drugs.
He hopes to change that and in the matter of new anti-cancer drugs, the science is looking auspicious.
Most anti-cancer drugs work by selectively killing actively dividing cells, meaning that non-dividing tumour cells are immune to treatment.
EntreMed, an American biotech firm, saw its share price quadruple on reports that its anti-cancer drugs clear tumours in mice.
He later built companies that developed anti-cancer drugs like Abraxane.
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Dr Ellen Vitetta and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas developed the vaccine as a result of research into new anti-cancer drugs.
For a variety of reasons, one could say that ZIOPHARM Oncology (ZIOP), a tiny little-known biopharmaceutical company developing several anti-cancer drugs, is now several notches above its peers in the highly volatile and competitive biotech industry.
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Apart from its anti-cancer drugs Fusilev and Zevalin, Spectrum has 10 other oncology drug candidates that are now in clinical development, two of them in phase 3 clinical trials and several undergoing phase 1 and 2 clinical studies.
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In one tantalizing moment, Andrew Dannenberg , a cancer prevention guru from Cornell University, said that a trial he was working on using older anti-inflammatory drugs had found these medicines--drugs like ibuprofen and naproxen--had prevented cancer but caused heart attacks.
Also, he says, no randomly controlled studies have shown that either aspirin or other anti-inflammatory drugs reduce colon cancer deaths.
According to Stephen Rosenfeld, a lawyer with the Prescription Access Litigation Project, which has launched a class-action suit against AstraZeneca and Barr Laboratories over Tamoxifen, an anti-cancer drug, delays to generic drugs mean that 42m Americans who lack health insurance pay a high price, and may not get essential medicines at all.
Amgen and Watson did not disclose which drugs they will focus on, but some of the biggest drugs in the world are anti-cancer antibodies, and many, including top-seller Rituxan, from Roche and Biogen, and Herceptin, also from Roche, were approved nearly two decades ago.
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The focus must shift to newer drugs like Chantix, the most effective anti-smoking drug yet developed, and Pfizer's emerging pipeline of cancer drugs.
For other protein drugs not being made at Novo, including insulins and also anti-cancer antibodies, that number is more like one in five.
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But it remains to be seen whether autoimmune drugs can draw the same kinds of high price tags that have made anti-cancer chemicals like Avastin such big sellers.
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