(Bloomberg) -- Daiichi Sankyo Co. will seek to maintain its edge over competitors in precision cancer therapies, by pushing ahead with clinical trials of drug candidates being developed using new technology, a top executive said.
The Japanese drugmaker believes its next generation of so-called antibody drug conjugate medicines that show promise in early stage human testing will help keep the company ahead of the pack, its President and Chief Operating Officer Hiroyuki Okuzawa told Bloomberg News on Friday in Tokyo.
“Big pharma companies and Chinese drugmakers are following us, but we will stay ahead of them,” he said.
ADC works like a guided missile that hits cancerous cells while sparing the healthy ones, and has the potential to replace chemotherapy. Daiichi has emerged as a leader in this space following the success of a breast cancer therapy developed with AstraZeneca Plc, and a $22 billion deal with Merck & Co to work on similar drugs.
In September, Daiichi said that one of its latest experimental therapies dubbed DS-9606 developed through the company’s newer ADC drug platform has shown early promise against multiple cancer types, where existing therapies have led to poor patient outcomes.
Despite the resounding success brought by the ‘Enhertu’ therapy for breast cancer, some of Daiichi’s subsequent candidates have faced setbacks this year. An ADC drug dubbed Dato-DXd co-developed with Astra fell short of expectations around extending patients’ lives on a metric called overall survival.
Separately, Daiichi and Merck are working to address questions from the US Food and Drug Administration over an ADC drug candidate that’s proved to curb cancer growth in late stage trials.
Meanwhile, the race to develop ADC into the industry’s next blockbuster medicine has heated up, with pharma juggernauts from Pfizer Inc. and AbbVie Inc. wading into the space and spawning some of the industry’s biggest acquisitions in recent years. A growing legion of Chinese biotechs have also come up with promising ADC candidates, earning them partnerships with leading global drugmakers.
Given ADC drug’s potential to become the mainstream treatment option for cancer, drugmakers including Daiichi and Astra are boosting production. Okuzawa said the company is working with external contract manufacturers to expand capacity beyond the new plants the company has planned.
On Enhertu, Okuzawa said it’s on track to achieve a revenue forecast of over 500 billion yen ($3.4 billion) this fiscal year, thanks to strong demand that comes in part from China.
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