Cancer Breakthroughs Meet Market Realities
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When Apostolia M. Tsimberidou was a young hematologist, a diagnosis of chronic myelogenous leukemia meant a patient had only a few years to live.
The median survival time when she started medical school in 1985, she recalls, was just 3.5 years. Then came Novartis Inc.’s Gleevec, or imatinib, which the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2001. Unlike traditional chemotherapy drugs, which work by poisoning the body’s fast-growing cells, Gleevec is a so-called biologic that works by altering the behavior of abnormal protein molecules -- in this case, inhibiting an enzyme that makes the cancer cells proliferate.