The first thing you notice after entering Catherine J. Mackey's roomy corner office at Pfizer Inc.'s sprawling research labs in La Jolla is the Ouija board set out on a table. Mackey jokes she uses the game to divine which of the many molecules from the labs is likeliest to become a successful drug.
Picking a winner is one of the toughest jobs in the pharmaceutical business, but Mackey, the La Jolla research chief, is close to delivering Pfizer's first biotechnology drug for cancer.
Called Sutent, the drug doesn't attack cancer cells directly but starves them by cutting off their blood supply. The once-daily pill showed promise in a rare digestive-tract cancer and kidney cancer in company-sponsored studies presented over the weekend at a medical meeting in Orlando, Fla.
Pfizer's research in the gastrointestinal stromal tumors, or GIST, is furthest along, and Sutent may be approved as a treatment for the digestive-tract cancer next year, analysts say.
The pill moves Pfizer, the marketing behemoth that made Viagra a household word, squarely into a category dominated by science-driven biotechs. Mackey, who had her office painted purple and took up surfing with the scientists from nearby Scripps Research Institute, said it was no accident that Pfizer situated labs in San Diego.
"Here you have the biotech culture," said Mackey, noting the city contains one of the world's largest clusters of biotechnology firms.
Sutent is in the same class as Genentech Inc.'s Avastin, an intravenous drug that is on its way to becoming a multibillion-dollar-a-year product. The drugs won't directly compete because Avastin has not been approved for GIST or kidney cancer. Sutent would be an important addition for Pfizer, which recently withdrew its arthritis pill Bextra and watched Celebrex sales sink.
Behind Sutent is an enormous investment by Pfizer in biotechnology drugs for cancer. The company is plowing nearly $1 billion into cancer research, and has 14 experimental drugs in human tests.
"I've been told our oncology portfolio is among the strongest, if not the strongest, in the industry," William Slichenmyer, vice president for worldwide therapeutics, said at a news briefing in Orlando on Sunday.
A day earlier, the company presented new research at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology showing that Pfizer's pill significantly delayed progression of cancer in patients with GIST who had become resistant to Gleevec, a Novartis pill. Sutent delayed progression of cancer by 6.3 months compared with 1.3 months for patients on a placebo.
