Advancing Cancer Care

“Living with cancer, you need a positive attitude,” says 64-year-old Richard Pflaum of Bath, England. “What you need is to be able to take some sort of action.” So Richard is participating in an ongoing clinical study with abiraterone acetate, a promising investigational medicine for the treatment of metastatic advanced prostate cancer.

Globally, prostate cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer in men and the fifth most common cancer overall. More than 900,000 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in 2008, and more than 258,000 men died from the disease, a 16 percent increase from 2002.

Abiraterone acetate has not received marketing authorization and is for investigational use only. Based on positive results from a completed Phase III study, marketing applications were filed with regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Europe in December 2010, with additional filings planned for 2011.

With abiraterone acetate, the oncology franchise is developing strategies it hopes will one day help prevent or cure certain types of prostate and other cancers. Researchers are working hand-in-hand with today’s top oncology experts, testing compounds that disrupt the surrounding tumor microenvironment that helps cancer thrive and using biomarkers to improve patient outcomes.

Abiraterone acetate acts by blocking the synthesis of hormones produced by the body, including those produced by prostate cancer tissue to fuel its growth, according to William Hait, M.D., Ph.D., Global Therapeutic Area Head, Oncology. “We believe that abiraterone acetate is an important medical advance, and we look forward to further developing additional therapies for oncology patients that will help save the lives of people around the world,” he says.

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