| St. Jude invests in drug research
Leaders of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital say they're
seeking new drugs to treat childhood cancer and other rare
diseases because they don't believe the pharmaceutical industry
will.
The overall cure rate for major childhood cancers is around
70 percent today, and leaders at St. Jude, a leading research
center for childhood cancer and other rare diseases, say
better drugs could save more children's lives.
But companies are unlikely to invest the hundreds of millions
of dollars it takes to develop the new drugs, said Dr. James
Downing, the hospital's scientific director.
"Probably the biggest obstacle is these are rare diseases,
and there is little financial incentive for a large pharmaceutical
company to pursue work in these areas," he said.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,
a group representing drug manufacturers, didn't provide
information about member research in children's cancer drugs
Thursday. But it said in a statement that drug manufacturers
have made strides in fighting rare diseases and that the
Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 160
new medicines for such illnesses over the past decade.
However, the authors of a 2005 National Academy of Sciences
report, titled "Making Better Drugs for Children with
Cancer," say the number of children with cancer is
so small that the extra incentives the federal government
gives to the makers of drugs for rare diseases aren't enough
to encourage companies to invest in research.
Roughly one in 6,400 children was diagnosed with cancer
in 2001, according to the report.
The result of the lack of company research is that most
children are treated with drugs that were designed for adults,
the report says.
"But in fact, the biological and clinical characteristics
of nearly all childhood cancers differ substantially from
adult cancers," the report states.
Those differences mean there is a chance to discover new
drugs and raise survival rates, the report's authors write.
The leaders of St. Jude don't express resentment against
pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, Downing said the hospital
wants to work with pharmaceutical firms to bring the drugs
to clinical trials and eventually to market once the basic
research is complete.
The company would pay St. Jude for its intellectual property
to prevent money from hospital donors from flowing to a
private company, he said. And St. Jude would look for deal
terms that would ensure that the new drug was reasonably
priced and available to patients, he said.
The hospital recently began a new chemical biology and
therapeutics department, and leaders have said they plan
to invest $60 million in it over the next five years.
St. Jude has also built a sophisticated automated facility
that screens thousands of compounds for their effectiveness
against cancer.
Despite the scale of the investment, St. Jude is setting
modest goals.
"We hope over the next few years to be able to move
one of those compounds forward into a clinical trial,"
Downing said.
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