Eisai Co.
said it expects its new drug for thyroid and other cancers to bring in more than $1 billion a year by 2020.
Ivan Cheung,
an Eisai executive leading the rollout of the drug called
lenvatinib, said in an interview Thursday that approval from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration for thyroid cancer was “imminent.”
An Eisai-funded study published Thursday in the New England Journal
of Medicine said 65% of thyroid-cancer patients taking Lenvatinib showed
a response to the drug, compared with 1.5% on placebo. The study
involved thyroid-cancer patients whose disease didn’t respond to initial
treatments such as radioactive iodine.
Some patients experienced
serious side effects in the study. Six of the 261 patients on the drug
died for reasons that study investigators judged were treatment-related.
Lenvatinib,
a pill taken once daily, works by inhibiting the creation of new blood
vessels. Eisai says the drug, created in its laboratories in 1999,
inhibits more substances that foster blood vessels, making it harder for
cancer cells to resist.
“You block the front door and block the back door,” said Mr. Cheung.
He declined to say how much the drug would cost, but such cancer drugs generally cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.
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