Ganitumab demise a disappointment for pancreatic cancer community

There was bad news not just for US biotech giant Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN), which last week announced that, on the advice of an independent data monitoring board, the company will discontinue development of the investigational pancreatic cancer ganitumab (The Pharma Letter August 9).

In a planned interim analysis, the DMC concluded that the ganitumab/Gemzar (gemcitabine) combination was unlikely to significantly improve the overall survival of patients compared to Gemzar monotherapy, GAMMA’s primary endpoint. Amgen also announced it would be stopping a separate Phase II trial investigating the use of ganitumab in locally advanced pancreatic cancer. The GAMMA trial was co-sponsored by Takeda, who has the right to develop and commercialize ganitumab in Japan through collaboration with Amgen.

Commenting on the news, business information provider GlobalData said the pancreatic cancer community will no doubt receive this news with great disappointment. Pancreatic cancer has a relatively low prevalence in the USA; the American Cancer Society estimates 43,920 new cases will be diagnosed in 2012, compared to 226,870 new cases of breast cancer and 226,160 new cases of lung cancer. As a result, pancreatic cancer awareness is much lower than that of these other, more prevalent diseases.