His point was that the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration are increasingly able to handle preclinical and early clinical drug development, and that with these first steps taken medicines are more likely to be brought to market by large pharmaceutical companies.
The studies were only the second of two phases in drug development, and larger, more rigorous clinical trials will need to be conducted before the drug reaches the market.
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But Paul Herrling, head of corporate research at Novartis, says such investments could go far, as the firm does not expect to do the costly bits of drug development, such as clinical trials, itself.
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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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Such models, which are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, take inputs such as the costs of clinical trials, the length of each stage of drug development and the probability of success at each stage.
But then the drug increased the death rate in clinical trials, and its development was ended.
The drug, developed through Cancer Research UK's Clinical Development Partnerships (CDP), starves cancer cells of the sugars they need to grow and develop.
As a patient-based organisation, it can tap directly into one of the scarcest commodities in drug development access to the right patients for clinical trials.
Cell Therapeutics said it intends to use net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including paying interest on or retiring outstanding debt and funding research and development, preclinical and clinical trials, and the preparation and filing of new drug applications.
It also has a drug that is being tested in late-stage clinical trials and another in the early stages of development.
The law also lessened the economic burden of drug development by offering a 50-percent tax credit for the costs incurred during the clinical trial phase.
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