Global families

GLOBAL INVESTOR 1.07 Basics — 23
time ever, regulatory approval for that kind of diagnostic again was
no small feat. It was a real accomplishment for the company.
So, with your chip technology, let’s say you find a particular
gene that looks interesting for a particular disease, but then there
has been a professor or a group of people working in the field
for years. Would you then collaborate? Do you do academic collaboration
when you find new biomarkers?
Prof. Lindpaintner: The pharmaceutical industry lives and dies by
academic collaborations. There’s no two ways about it. We are completely
dependent on excellent relationships with academia for each
and every one of our clinical development studies and not only in
the clinical field, but also of course in the basic science field. So
this is very much a networking and partnering with both academicians
and small biotechnology companies.
Can you give any examples of a successful academic collaboration
and successful biomarker from which you have been able
to develop specific drugs for specific groups of people? Are there
any successful tailor-made drugs on the market today?
Prof. Lindpaintner: Yes, indeed. Herceptin is a monoclonal antibody
that is revolutionizing the treatment of breast cancer. This is a
drug where the story started in academia with the recognition that
some tumors behave differently than others. In other words, they’re
much more aggressive, they’re much more likely to kill their carriers
in a short period of time. Based on that, basic research demonstrated
that the majority of those very aggressive tumors have one characteristic
in common, and that is an overexpression, in other words
an exaggerated level, of a particular gene called Her 2, an oncogene,
or cancer-related gene. The gene product of Her 2 is a receptor on the
cell surface which binds a specific growth factor and signals the cell
to grow and divide. Now, the next leap of faith was then to say, well
what if we develop a drug that very specifically inhibits that particular
mechanism; it should help the patients in whom this mechanism
contributes to rapid tumor growth. And this was a time when it had
just recently become possible to actually produce specifically targeting
antibodies.
These are mouse monoclonals?
Prof. Lindpaintner: Yes. The next step was to actually make the
mouse monoclonal antibody into a “humanized” antibody, and then
clinical research over years was done demonstrating every step
along the way, that yes, this seems to work, yes this seems to be
promising, yes this is actually something that is a completely new
approach to treating cancers. This is not only a particularly effective
therapy because it specifically addresses the mechanism by which
these cancer cells grow, but also – and this is just as important for
these patients who in the past have had to endure the ravages of
conventional chemotherapy – it is a much better-tolerated form of
therapy. It is a kind of silver bullet, a heat-seeking missile that hones
in on just those cells that overexpress the oncogene. And it doesn’t
do collateral damage. This is a good example for a personalized,
targeted therapy. So this is a therapy that is specifically targeted to
those women – about 25% of all breast cancer patients – who have
the overexpression of Her 2 and the aggressive type of tumor. It’s
not tailored for each individual, but for a group of patients who now
benefit from a better treatment.
So you don’t believe in an individual drug? You don’t see this
as a trend that could evolve in the future, where each person has
their own personalized drug?
Prof. Lindpaintner: If you consider that it costs USD 1 billion to
develop one new medicine, and if we work to develop that specific
Klaus Lindpaintner, a native of Innsbruck, Austria,
graduated from the University of Innsbruck Medical
School with a degree in medicine and from Harvard
University with a degree in public health. After his postgraduate
training and specialization in internalmedicine,
cardiology and genetics in the USA and Germany,
he practiced cardiology and pursued research in the
area of cardiovascular disease, molecular genetics and
genetic epidemiology, most recently as an Asso-ciate
Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in
Boston, Massachusetts. He joined Hoffman-La Roche
Pharmaceuticals in Basel in 1997 as Head of Preclinical
Research in Cardiovascular Diseases. Since 1998, he
has served as Head of Roche Genetics, and since 2001,
also as Director of the Roche Center for Medical
Genomics, coordinating the company’s efforts and
activities in genetics, genomics, proteomics and
associated disciplines.
Photo: Roche