Jan Lundberg tells the Marketletter how AstraZeneca is turning around its pipeline

In an interview with the Marketletter, senior AstraZeneca executive Jan Lundberg said the pharmaceutical industry as a whole can speed up the  early stages of drug development, shortening by up to three months the  delay between bench and clinic. "As an industry, we can really improve  the whole clinical trial arena," he said.

The executive vice president of global discovery research at the  Anglo-Swedish drug major referred to a project with the MD Anderson  Cancer Center that reduced the wait between US Food and Drug  Administration approval of a trial protocol to study initiation from the  usual 130 days to just 46 days.

The prestigious specialist cancer hospital based in Houston, Texas, is  conducting the first-in-man study of AZD8330 - a Phase I, open-label  pharmcokinetics trial assessing the oral drug in patients with advanced  malignancies. The agent selectively inhibits mitogen-activated protein  kinase kinase 1, blocking growth factor-mediated cell signaling and  tumor cell proliferation. MEK is a key component of the RAS/RAF/MEK/ERK  signaling pathway that regulates cell growth and has been implicated in  many cancers.