Pharma is attracted to early-stage antibody deals in oncology

Today, the top ten best-selling antibody therapeutics for cancer have accumulated revenues approaching $200 billion, according to a report from licensing professionals PharmaVentures. Antibody therapies are successful in increasing patient survival; however, statistics show that there is still room to significantly improve clinical benefits, it notes.

Until more companion biomarkers become available, early utility of high cost antibody therapeutics is unlikely to become mainstream. While antibody therapeutics for cancer clearly offer clinical benefits over other drugs, the cost of development and manufacture is high. In many cases, these therapies only extend life by a relatively small amount and thus their high costs are sometimes hard for payers to justify.