Novartis AG, one of the world’s leading cancer drug companies, is
making a big bet on emerging science that uses the body’s immune system
to fight off tumors.
Novartis already has 22 oncology drugs on the
market to treat everything from breast cancer to leukemia, and 25 more
under development, a virtual war chest of targeted treatments. Now the
Swiss company, which runs its global drug-discovery efforts from the
Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research here, has launched a
research group specializing in the field of immuno-oncology.
Last month, Novartis hired a nationally known cancer vaccine
authority, Dr. Glenn Dranoff, to lead the group, focusing on three
distinct therapeutic areas but also exploring how to combine them with
existing cancer drugs.“This is a huge field that’s just beginning,” said Mark C. Fishman,
president of the Novartis Institutes and the company’s global research
chief, noting that each approach to fighting cancer is currently proving
effective for only a limited number of patients.
“We’re trying to educate the immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign. Our goal is to cure cancer.” Excitement
about immuno therapies has been building over the past 2½ years, since
scientists at the University of Pennsylvania reprogrammed the immune
system to attack cancer cells in about a dozen leukemia patients,
causing complete remissions in some.
A drug developed jointly by
Novartis and UPenn showed promising results in an early safety study on
patients with solid tumors, according to results presented last weekend
at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
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