Biotec Pharmacon and the Department of Oncology at Ullevål University Hospital in Oslo have announced that they are to commence clinical studies to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Biotec Pharmacon’s beta-glucan-based pharmaceutical compound SBG in combination with cancer antibodies on breast cancer patients. SBG will first be tested out in combination with the cancer antibody Herceptin (Roche) in women with a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer.
The two parties intend to discover if SBG in combination with cancer antibodies has higher treatment efficacy than the cancer antibodies on their own. If initial studies support this idea, the parties will seek to establish broader therapeutic explorative clinical studies, possibly with other hospitals in Norway and abroad. The parties may also agree to perform studies with other cancer types than breast cancer.
According to Jan Raa, Chief Scientific Officer of Biotec Pharmacon, the Company is delighted to have initiated this cooperation with a leading group in cancer medicine in Norway: “It is the intention of the two parties to initiate studies during the first half of 2006. We are also already carrying out a clinical trial with SBG in combination with cancer antibodies at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. The Company’s strategy is to carry out several clinical trials with SBG in combination with antibodies against different cancer types.”
The total sale of monoclonal cancer antibodies was around 5 billion US$ in 2004, of which the world-wide sale of Herceptin was around 1 billion US$, a market dominated by Roche and Genentech.
