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Oncology Therapeutics Market
The American Cancer Society estimates that over 1.5 million people in the U.S. are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in 2010, excluding basal and squamous cell skin cancers and in situ carcinomas (other than urinary bladder carcinomas). This is an increase of approximately 25% from the estimated number of new cancer diagnoses of approximately 1.2 million in 2000. We believe this rate is unlikely to decrease in the foreseeable future as the causes of cancer are multiple and poorly understood.
Despite continuous advances every year in the field of cancer research, there remains a significant unmet medical need in the treatment of cancer, as the overall five-year survival rate for a cancer patient diagnosed between 1999 and 2005 still averages only 68% according to the American Cancer Society. According to that same source, cancer is the second leading cause of mortality in the U.S. behind heart disease. Overall, the American Cancer Society estimates that approximately one in four deaths in the U.S. is due to cancer.
One of the main treatments for cancer is chemotherapy. While chemotherapy is the most widely used class of anti-cancer agents, individual chemotherapeutic agents show limited efficacy because tumors maintain complex machinery to repair the DNA damage to tumor cells caused by chemotherapy. Solutions to this problem include combination chemotherapy, but while combination chemotherapy has been intensively studied, it offers only limited hope for improvement as a result of additive toxicities. The limitations inherent in chemotherapy are mirrored by limitations in other therapeutic modalities for cancer, including radiation therapy, targeted therapies and surgical intervention. Each of these therapies either has high levels of toxicity and/or potentially severe adverse events, which in turn frequently limit the amount of treatment that can be administered to a patient.
As a result, we believe that there is a significant unmet medical need for alternatives to existing chemotherapy drugs that do not have the associated toxicities of traditional chemotherapy drugs.
Despite continuous advances every year in the field of cancer research, there remains a significant unmet medical need in the treatment of cancer, as the overall five-year survival rate for a cancer patient diagnosed between 1999 and 2005 still averages only 68% according to the American Cancer Society. According to that same source, cancer is the second leading cause of mortality in the U.S. behind heart disease. Overall, the American Cancer Society estimates that approximately one in four deaths in the U.S. is due to cancer.
One of the main treatments for cancer is chemotherapy. While chemotherapy is the most widely used class of anti-cancer agents, individual chemotherapeutic agents show limited efficacy because tumors maintain complex machinery to repair the DNA damage to tumor cells caused by chemotherapy. Solutions to this problem include combination chemotherapy, but while combination chemotherapy has been intensively studied, it offers only limited hope for improvement as a result of additive toxicities. The limitations inherent in chemotherapy are mirrored by limitations in other therapeutic modalities for cancer, including radiation therapy, targeted therapies and surgical intervention. Each of these therapies either has high levels of toxicity and/or potentially severe adverse events, which in turn frequently limit the amount of treatment that can be administered to a patient.
As a result, we believe that there is a significant unmet medical need for alternatives to existing chemotherapy drugs that do not have the associated toxicities of traditional chemotherapy drugs.