Good morning, everyone, and how are you today? A shiny sun is enveloping the Pharmalot campus, where our short person has long since left for the local schoolhouse and the official mascots are romping around the grounds. As for us, we are as busy as ever tackling our ever-growing to-do list. We trust you can relate. So time to get cracking. Here are some tidbits to help you along. Hope you have a wonderful day …
The US Food and Drug Administration approved a Roche drug called Tecentriq for treating advanced bladder cancer, the Wall Street Journal notes. The drug, a PD-L1 inhibitor that will cost about $12,500 per patient a month, is the first product in its class to get FDA regulatory approval to treat advanced cases of a common type of bladder cancer called urothelial carcinoma. And the agency is not requiring doctors to administer a PD-L1 diagnostic first.
An estimated 40 percent of 655 people who took Merck’s Keytruda drug in a clinical trial to treat advanced melanoma were still alive three years after starting treatment, the Wall Street Journal reports. The study reinforces the potential for new immune-boosting drugs to prolong the lives of people with the deadly form of skin cancer. The median overall survival among patients in the study was about two years.
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I think this would make an interesting subject for Pharmalot re S. R. Burzynski. From the article referenced – “It is unclear why if there was a deficiency in 2015, the trial was able to begin in 2016 and then shut down within weeks. The agency refused to eloborate (sic) on the inconsistency,”