Sunshine Biopharma Looking to Mimic Roche’s Billion-Dollar Cancer Drug
(from 2011)
Last year, over 260,000 new cases of breast cancer (invasive and in situ combined) were diagnosed in women in the US. Over the course of a woman’s lifetime, the odds are greater than 12% (or 1 out of every 8) that she will develop invasive breast cancer and have only about a 41% chance of surviving for 5 years if not detected until stage IIIB (odds are increased to approximately 90% if caught in stage I). Although most people don’t consider it, men aren’t removed from invasive breast cancer stats either; nearly 2,000 new cases were diagnosed in 2010 as well.
Given the high death rate for late-stage detection (odds slip all the way to a meager 15% chance of living 5 more years when detected in stage 4), there is a huge area of unmet need for new therapies to treat the disease. One company looking to make a dent in the number of breast cancer deaths is Montreal, Canada-based Sunshine Biopharma, Inc., a drug maker engaged in researching and developing drugs for a wide array of cancers with their initial focus on breast cancer.
Sunshine is taking the path less traveled by attacking drug-resistant cancers, a course of action that can be difficult, but reap impressive rewards if successful and Sunshine is showing promising results to date. The company’s flagship compound in development is Adva-27, a small molecule that targets and inhibits Topoisomerase II (Top2), an enzyme found in abundance in various types of aggressive carcinomas. It is widely known that there are two genes associated with aggressive forms of cancer: Her2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor-2) and Top2. Swiss drug maker Roche’s Herceptin (Trastuzumab) is an effective treatment for Her2-positive patients. Showcasing the magnitude of usage for a viable indication addressing one of the genes, Herceptin generated roughly $7 billion in global sales for Roche in 2010.
Recently, Sunshine announced it has completed a detailed cytotoxicity study, a measure of a drug’s ability to destroy cancer cells in vitro, of Adva-27a, in MCF-7/MDR, a multidrug-resistant breast cancer cell line. According to the company, the study’s results showed that Adva-27a is 16-times more effective at killing multidrug-resistant breast cancer cells than Etoposide, a current commonly used drug. In addition, data generated by the study revealed that Adva-27a is unaffected by the molecular machinery that are responsible for making cancer cells resistant to drugs. Multidrug resistance is a major component in the failure of many of today’s chemotherapies, so drugs that show the ability to thwart the resistance factor are heralded as particularly valuable from both a humanitarian and financial standpoint.
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