Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc fka ARIA

[biotech_researcher]

This is a must read article, and dovetails in so well with the work that the University of Colorado is doing with Ponatinib in FGFR1 mutated NSCLC

The biggest opportunities are in cancer, which could become an $11 billion global market. Take the story of Heather Follweiler, 60. She started having headaches and then had difficulty moving her left side while on vacation in Vietnam and Cambodia. When she returned home she had a seizure. A 2 a.m. emergency CAT scan found a tumor in her brain that had spread there from somewhere else. Doctors removed it.

But then Follweiler, a retired financial services professional, found she had another tumor in her bowel. Her doctors opened her up, found it was too big to remove and sent her home. “I was basically throwing in the towel,” she said. But one of her physicians sent a tumor sample to Foundation Medicine, a startup backed by Bill Gates and Google Ventures that used Illumina’s sequencers to locate 236 mutations that could help direct drug treatment. As a result of the test she was given Pfizer’s Xalkori, which has made the bowel tumor undetectable and has kept it that way for more than a year. “I feel no different than I felt two and a half years ago,” she says.

Cancer is so big, in fact, that Flatley spent months convincing Richard Klausner, the former director of the National Cancer Institute, to be Illumina’s chief medical officer. At a dinner Klausner, thinking he was just giving advice, outlined a plan for Illumina’s future. At the end Flatley told him, “That’s exactly where we want to go, but I can’t lead us there. But you could.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/08/20/flatleys-law-how-one-company-became-the-force-behind-medicines-genetic-revolution/?partner=yahoomag