NEW YORK (Reuters) : Pfizer said it expects its cancer drug Lorbrena to top $1 billion in annual sales by 2030 on the strength of data presented on Friday, showing most patients treated for a rare form of advanced lung cancer in a clinical trial were alive without the disease worsening after five years. Lorbrena, like Pfizer’s Xalkori, is designed to treat cancer with a mutation of a specific gene called anaplastic lymphoma kinase, or ALK. Sixty per cent of ALK-positive patients with advanced lung cancer who were treated with Lorbrena had no disease progression after five years, according to follow-up results from the company’s Phase 3 CROWN trial unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.
That compared with five-year progression-free survival of just 8pc of patients treated with Xalkori. About 53pc of Lorbrena patients whose cancer had spread to the brain at the start of the trial were alive without disease progression after five years, the data also showed. “We believe this is a blockbuster opportunity for Pfizer,” Chief Oncology Officer Chris Boshoff said in an interview.
With “increased uptake, increased market penetration, longer duration of treatment, many more patients tested” for ALK mutations, Boshoff said, “we believe it’s a very different opportunity than Xalkori,” which never reached blockbuster sales of more than $1bn annually. Boshoff said China would be a particularly important market for Lorbrena. While 4pc of n.
