About this Author
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.
To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com
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July 22, 2008
Posted by Derek
Merck took the unusual step of delaying its earnings release yesterday until after the close of the market. A report on another clinical study of Vytorin (ezetimibe), their drug with Schering-Plough, was coming out, so they put the numbers on hold until after the press release yesterday afternoon. Naturally, this led to a lot of speculation about what was going on. A conspiracy-minded website vastly unfriendly to Schering-Plough suspected some sort of elaborate ruse to drum up publicity.
But that sort of thinking doesn't take you very far, unless you count the distance you rack up going around in circles. As it turned out, the SEAS trial (Simvastatin and Ezetimibe in Aortic Stenosis) was, in fact, very bad publicity indeed for the drug and for both companies. In fact, a real conspiracy would have made sure that these numbers never saw the light of day, or were at least released at 6 PM on a Friday. But no, the spotlight was on them good and proper.
This trial studied patients with chronic aortic stenosis, which is a different condition than classic atherosclerosis. The two have enough similarities, though, that there has been much interest in whether statin treatment could be effective. The primary endpoint, a composite of aortic valve and general cardiovascular events, was missed. Vytorin was no better than placebo. It reached significance against one secondary endpoint, reducing the risk of various ischemic events, but not in any dramatic fashion.
That's not necessarily a surprise, since there's not a well-established therapy for aortic stenosis (thus the trial design versus placebo). As several commenters to the conference call after the press conference pointed out, this shouldn't change clinical practice much at all. But it's not what Merck and Schering-Plough needed to hear, that's for sure, because the sound bite will be "Vytorin Fails Again".
Actually, the sound bite will be even worse than that. There are a lot of headlines this morning about another observation from the SEAS trial: that significantly more patients in the treatment arm of the study were diagnosed with cancer. That's a red warning light, for sure, but in this case we have at least some data to decide how much of one.
For one thing, as far as I know there have been no reports of increased cancer among the patients taking Vytorin out in the marketplace - of course, one could argue that this might have been missed, but if the effect were as large as seen in the SEAS study, I don't think it would have been. Analyses of the earlier Vytorin trials and the ongoing IMPROVE-IT trial versus Zocor have also shown no cancer risk, and the latter trial is continuing. So for now, it would appear that either this was a nasty result by chance, or (a longer shot) that there's something different about the aortic stenosis patients that leads to major trouble with Vytorin.
None of these scientific and statistical arguments, and I mean none of them, will avail Schering-Plough and Merck. Among people who've heard of Vytorin at all, the first thing that will come to mind is "doesn't work", and after today's headlines, the second thing that will come to mind is "cancer". Just what you want, to put out press releases that your compound, even though it failed to work again, isn't actually a cancer risk. You really couldn't do worse; a gang of saboteurs couldn't have done worse. Of course, there's no such gang: the companies themselves authorized these trials, thinking that there were home runs to be hit. But all these sidelines - familial hypercholesteremia, aortic stenosis - have only sown fear, confusion, and doubt. The only thing that I can see rescuing Vytorin as a useful drug is for the IMPROVE-IT results to show really robust efficacy in its real-world patients. And I wonder if even that could be enough.
Comments (19)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business and Markets | Cancer | Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Toxicology
June 24, 2008
Posted by Derek
This week was supposed to reveal the FDA's decision on Dai-Ichii Sankyo and Eli Lilly's anticlotting drug prasugrel. That one's in the same chemical class as Plavix (clopidogrel), and works by the same mechanism. Since Plavix did about eight billion dollars of business last year, and the anticlotting area seems to be a limitlessly huge market in general, you can understand why another drug is entering the space.
Both clopidogrel and pasugrel are prodrugs - their structures, as they come out of the bottle, are inactive. But they're converted by cytochrome P450 enzymes in the liver to their active forms, which bind irreversibly to the P2Y12 purinergic receptor on platelets. The clopidogrel link above shows the active form - that thiophene ring gets broken open, and a reactive SH is exposed. The P2Y12 receptor mediates platelet aggregation, so shutting it down extends clotting time.
A few points: for one, you'll note that the structures of the two drugs are very similar indeed. Is pasugrel just a "me-too", then? Well, it certainly is trying to do the same thing by the same mechanism, but as I've said here many times, it's hard to sell a drug unless you can point to some difference. The advantage that prasugrel has is that its metabolic activation takes place through a broader number of liver enzymes, so more of the active metabolite is produced across a wider patient population. And it is indeed about ten times more potent in humans - which may, though, prove to be its downfall.
In the clinic, the large TRITON-TIMI trial ran the two drugs head to head in over 13,000 patients, which is certainly the expensive (and definitive) way to go. The end result was that the prasugrel-treated group had fewer cardiovascular problems of all kinds (good!), but more episodes of severe bleeding (bad!). Overall mortality was the same between the two groups, and that's where the arguing has started. There's a lot of room to break down the numbers more thoroughly to see if there's some real benefit to the drug (or alternatively, to show that it really isn't any more useful than Plavix).
Of course, this is the job of the FDA. And now it seems that they've chosen to punt, delaying their decision by three months. Since the companies don't seem to have been asked to submit any more data, this seems to be an internal wrangle at the agency. I'm not sure what they're going to accomplish by holding their heads and moaning for another quarter, unless the hope is that the numbers can be crunched in some direction which will offer enough of a fingerhold to justify a decision. This is a very, very close call.
If I had to predict - and hey, I write this blog, so I've got a license to do that sort of thing - I'd say that the agency will ultimately approve the drug, but with label restrictions. In the end, they'll turf the problem over to the cardiologists, but with enough warning language on it that no one should be surprised if patients bleed out on occasion. The best outcome would be for some sort of clinical sign to indicate which patients should avoid the drug. The FDA will probably head in that direction, since it appears that the majority of bleeding problems occurred in the oldest and/or lowest-body-weight groups in the trial.
Update: but is that the case? Looking at the NEJM paper, it appears that patients not in these groups did have better efficacy with prasugrel, which improves the numbers. But the hazard ratio for major bleeding was 1.42 in the risky patients (>75 years old, or body weight < 60 kilos, or history of stroke/TIA), but still 1.24 in the ones outside these groups. So it's not at all fair to say that most of the bleeding events were in the risky patients - frankly, it looks like everyone bled, but the healthier cohort just responded better to the drug at the same time. That complicates my guess in the above paragraph, and raises the worst-case chance that the FDA might want to wait until the current trial comes in. What a mess. . .
There's another 10,000 patient study underway which might clarify the situation, or might just emphasize what a tied-up tangle it all is. In the end, I think that the FDA will let the drug be sold until that one finishes up, with the option to revise its opinion when the data come in. The three-month delay will serve to show how seriously they're taking all the safety issues - a big political consideration these days - and to work up the most bulletproof labeling they can come up with.
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June 5, 2008
Posted by Derek
You may or may not have noticed, but slowly and quietly, Merck has been getting many of the large Vioxx judgments against it overturned on appeal. These cases made huge headlines when they were first tried, but the articles that tell the end of the story have not, for the most part, made the front page.
This is one reason that the company was finally able to settle a huge number of pending lawsuits for much less than many people thought likely. Merck seemed to like its chances, considering the cases they’d won and the way things looked in the appeals courts, and the amount of money they were able to settle for finally became a better deal for them than the alternative of fighting out every case. Of course, now people are starting to wonder if the company settled too soon - opinions differ.
It's important to note, though, that some of these reversals have been less than total victories for Merck. The first Texas case falls into that category, but the New Jersey punitive damages were thrown out based on the idea of pre-emption. A state jury, the appeals court ruled, can't decide if Merck defrauded the federal government when it got Vioxx approved. (We'll be revisiting that part of the argument when Wyeth v. Levine and Warner-Lamber v. Kent get decided).
But in the end, what looked for a while like an avalanche that might sweep the company away has come down to . . .what? Twenty cases went to juries, and Merck has now prevailed, to a large degree, in 17 of them, including all the largest awards. The Vioxx affair has still been a big financial hit, and it’s definitely had effects on Merck, but it hasn’t been quite the disaster it looked like being. Well, not financially - the company's reputation has taken a fearsome beating, and the drug industry as a whole hasn't come out of the business looking any better, either.
I can’t claim to have kept a cool head through the thing. There really was a period where the entire Vioxx affair could have taken a different turn – if Merck had lost a string of jury trials at the start, a settlement would have been much harder to arrange, and would have cost (naturally) a huge amount more. But fighting the first wave of cases to an expensive draw and appealing every verdict that went against them turned out to be the right strategy. Of course, any rational observer would have wished for a world where the whole business never would have taken place, but that's not where we find ourselves.
But, as you’ll have noticed, the preceding paragraphs are written from a point of view that’s pretty sympathetic to Merck. Zooming out to a more neutral view, what do we have? Vioxx certainly did some people a great deal of harm. The clinical data that led to its withdrawal make it extremely likely that some people experienced heart attacks, fatal in some cases, because they took the drug. Where the arguing starts is when you start pinning numbers to that last sentence. Vioxx’s bad effects, though real, were also small compared to the number of people who took it. (And the arguing continues when you try to balance its bad effects with the good that it did for the patients who really needed it, who were surely, though, a small subset of the people who actually were on the drug).
Those last two sentences point to some of the problem. If Merck had not tried to make Vioxx the pain drug for everyone in the world with any kind of inflammation pain, it’s quite possible that its cardiovascular effects would never have been noticed. And it’s worth remembering that they were noticed during a trial for a completely different indication, the possibility that COX-2 inhibitors might have a protective effect against colon cancer. Only after that trial flashed an unmistakable statistical warning did everyone go back to Merck’s earlier data and start arguing about what could or should have been noticed before.
The problem is that many other drugs have data that, in retrospect, look like trouble. It’s just that in many cases, the trouble never appears, either because it never rises to the level of being noticed, or it never was really there to begin with. There are drug candidates that cause bad effects in one out of every ten people who take them, and those never make it out of the clinic. (Most of the ones causing trouble at that level don’t even make it into the clinic in the first place). The ones that cause trouble at one in a hundred get weeded out, too, if that trouble is bad enough. The one in a thousand, one in ten thousand, one in a hundred thousand levels are where the difficulty is, because clinical trials have an increasingly difficult time picking up those problems. They’ll show up, if they do, after a drug comes to market.
But why stop there? There’s no reason not to believe that there are drugs that also cause direct harm, but only to one out of every million patients. Or ten million, or hundred million. Some unlikely combination of genetic and environmental factors comes up – we really don’t know enough to rule that sort of thing at all. We call those drugs “safe”, but “safe” means “causing harm at too low a level to see”. Every single drug in the world has bad side effects, from the bottom of the scale (hideous old last-ditch chemotherapy drugs that are one step away from World War One battlefield agents), all the way up to the top. It's just a question of how often they turn up.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Toxicology
May 13, 2008
Posted by Derek
Schering-Plough has had its share of troubles over the years, but the company has also seen itself saved by some pretty unlikely compounds. Vytorin (ezetimibe) is the example I’ve spoken about here, and if the drug doesn’t seem like a savior at the moment, well, you have to keep in mind that it was the biggest thing for them since Claritin went off-patent ten years ago.
Now there’s another one potentially coming up. Expectations are building for a thrombin receptor antagonist compound, SCH 530348. And I have a history with this one, too: while the labs down one hallway from me were discovering ezetimibe, down the other hallway they were laying the foundation for this one. There’s a big difference, though, in the way I saw the two.
This thrombin antagonist is an unlikely drug for several reasons. For one thing, its structure is not the sort of thing most medicinal chemists would go out of their way to make. But there’s a good reason for that: to a first approximation, it wasn’t made with medicinal chemistry in mind. 530348 is based on a natural product called himbacine, whose fame, such as it is, rests on its properties as a semi-selective muscarinic antagonist. And that’s how Schering-Plough got interested in this class of compounds; thrombin had nothing to do with it.
At the time (early to mid 1990s) the company had a team working on Alzheimer’s disease, and I’ll go ahead and mention again that I was one of the people involved. (Five minutes on SciFinder would tell you that, anyway). We were quite interested in selective muscarinic antagonists, particularly for the m2 subtype, and himbacine was at the time one of the more selective compounds with that profile. So one of the group leaders at the company, Sam Chackalamannil, decided to synthesize it and do some SAR around the structure.
That was no small undertaking. Himbacine’s not one of the most complex natural products by any means, but it’s no stroll to the beach, either, especially when compared to the usual sorts of drug structures. It took a lot of time, a lot of ingenuity, and (most importantly) a lot of effort to do it. And I. . .well, I thought this was a terrible idea.
I really did. By the time himbacine itself got made, the project team had muscarinic compounds that were more selective and more potent (and a lot easier to make, to boot). I would listen to Chackalamannil’s people presenting their long, difficult routes during meetings, and I’d sit there imagining the company going slowly bankrupt if everyone adopted this approach, the revenue slowly sinking as the number of JACS communications rose. I couldn’t see the point, and although I don’t think I ever quite had the nerve to say so to Chackalamannil himself (hi, Sam!), I said it to plenty of other people.
So, is it time for me to eat crow? Well, one plateful, at least. Some of the himbacine analogs hit in the high-throughput screen for thrombin activity, to everyone’s surprise, and some further compounds (now shed of their muscarinic activity) were even better. The drug discovery effort culminated in 530548, which now might be about to benefit a huge number of people and make the company a ton of money, if everything goes well.
Of course, if these things hadn’t hit in the thrombin assay, I could have remained secure in my opinion. After all, they were never worth very much as muscarinics, as far as I know. (Of course, our muscarinic compounds, in the end, never were worth very much as Alzheimer’s drugs, which is something to keep in mind). So that’s the question: how likely is it for molecules like this to work? It’s very hard to answer that, but given this data point, I guess the answer is “at least a little more likely than I thought”. The very fact that they didn’t look like most other things in the screening deck was probably in their favor. I still think that these compounds were a long shot, but this is a business that lives on long shots. This one came through, and congratulations to everyone involved.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Alzheimer's Disease | Cardiovascular Disease | Drug Development
April 29, 2008
Posted by Derek
So why is Merck's stock dropping - again?
The FDA just unexpectedly handed them a "not approvable" letter for their latest drug, Cordaptive. Actually, we should stop calling it that, since they also told the company that they're not going to approve that name, either. What Merck's going to do with all their promotional freebies now, I can't imagine.
What's Cordaptive, or whatever it's called, anyway?
That's Merck's newest cardiovascular drug - although the active ingredient isn't new. It's niacin, also known as vitamin B3. It's been known for many years that niacin can both lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL, as well as lowering triglycerides - in fact, it's probably one of the only things that can do all of those significantly at the same time.
So this is a rip-off, then? Merck's trying to sell vitamin B for $20 a pill?
No, it actually isn't, at least not to the extent you're thinking. The problem with niacin as a cholesterol therapy is that you have to take whopping amounts of it to see an effect. And there's a side effect - flushing of the face, which is basically uncontrollable blushing that can last for hours in some cases. That may not sound like much, but the great majority of people who take niacin at these levels have a problem with it, and a lot of people discontinue the therapy rather than put up with it. If the drug is taken for a few weeks, the flushing reportedly eases off some, but not everyone makes it to that point. By all reports, it's very irritating - and since patients can't feel their cholesterol being high, but can feel their faces burning and turning red, they solve the problem by not taking the niacin.
So why doesn't Cordaptive do the same thing?
A lot of people have tried to find a way to keep the lipid effects of niacin and get rid of the flushing. Merck added a prostaglandin receptor antagonist, laropiprant, to try to block the pathway that leads to the vascular effects. And it seems to help quite a bit, which made the combination a potential winner. Abbott already has Niaspan, a slow-release version of niacin, which also has reduced flushing problems and does about $600 million of sales a year. Niacin therapy itself seems to be pretty safe, although you do want to make sure that liver and kidney function are normal before you start, so the only big question has been what blocking that DP1 receptor might do on the side: can you take that pathway out without causing more trouble?
Well, can you?
Apparently not. Actually, that should be "apparently there isn't enough evidence to say yet" - that's probably more in the spirit of the FDA's letter. They want to see more information about the drug. Problem is, the FDA treats this (properly) as a matter between the agency and the drug company, so they aren't saying what the problem is. And Merck, for its part, isn't saying, either. Investors feel rather left out in these situations - perhaps the most striking one in recent years was Sanofi-Aventis's absolute wall of silence for months about why the FDA wasn't approving their potential blockbuster Acomplia (rimonabant).
Why's this so unexpected, if there wasn't enough evidence given to the FDA?
Well, there seems to have been enough evidence in the same pile of data for the European Union, whose regulators approved recommended the drug for approval a few days ago. Merck must have felt reasonably confident that they'd get the same treatment here. No such luck. And as just mentioned, we don't know if the problem is not enough evidence of efficacy, not enough evidence of safety, or a bit of each.
Why don't you people just make cholesterol-lowering drugs that work better, then, so there's no doubt about efficacy?
Would that we could. Statins basically only lower LDL - they don't raise your HDL. And if you push the statins too hard, patients start coming down with rhabdomyolysis, and you don't want that - ask Bayer. Raising HDL has proven to be a real challenge, too. There are a lot of ideas about how to do it, but the most obvious ones aren't working out too well - ask Pfizer.
OK, then, why don't you just make safer versions of what you already have?
Would that we could. But in almost every case, we have no idea of how to do that. For the most part, either the safety concerns are tied up with the beneficial mechanism of the drug, or they're occurring through side pathways that we don't understand well and don't know how to avoid. And some of those are things that you don't even get a read on until your drug gets out into the market, which is no way to do things, either.
So, why is the drug business considered such a safe bet?
Now, that one I don't have an answer for. Unless it's the conviction that people are always going to get sick, which I guess is a pretty safe bet. And that's coupled with a conviction, apparently, that we're always going to be able to do something profitable about that. And some days, I have to wonder. . .
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Business and Markets | Cardiovascular Disease | Drug Development | Toxicology
April 4, 2008
Posted by Derek
This is turning into Cardiovascular Week around the blog, I have to say, and not in a good way. The latest news is the failure of a drug candidate from Takeda, TAK-475 (lapaquistat). They were in the lead in the field of squalene synthase inhibitors for cholesterol lowering (many other companies have taken a crack at this target, and dropped out along the way)., and their compound once had hopes of being a pretty big deal.
Not any more. In retrospect, the bell sounded late last year, when the company had to stop dosing at their highest level. Elevated transaminase levels were being seen in the treatment groups as the dose went up, which is a sure sign of trouble, as in liver damage trouble. Some investors seem to have held out hope for the compound to show enough efficacy at the lower doses, but Takeda has announced that the safety/efficacy ratio doesn’t justify taking the drug forward.
Liver enzymes are definitely one of those things you worry about when you go into man. There are all sorts of assays that are supposed to give you a read on that problem beforehand, and it’s safe to assume that Takeda ran them. But you’re never sure until you hit humans. Animals can react very differently to some compounds, although that can go either way. But if you set off liver enzyme trouble in rats or dogs your compound is probably dead, no matter how it might act in humans. You won’t get the chance to find out, most of the time.
The alternative is to use human liver tissue, but cultured human liver cells rapidly lose their native abilities and become untrustworthy as a model for the real world. Human liver slices are another alternative, but those are rather hard to come by, as you can well imagine, and the data from them have a reputation for being hard to interpret and hard to reproduce. No, for now, there’s no way to really know what will happen in humans without, well, using humans.
The big question that always gets asked in these failures is whether this is a compound-specific effect, a compound class effect, or a mechanistic effect. Most of the time it’s one of the first two. There are particular compounds, and particular structural series, that are known to be Bad News for liver enzymes. There will be some lingering doubt, though, because there’s plenty of squalene synthase activity in the liver, and it’s not impossible that any compound that hits it could cause the same trouble.
There are a number of other inhibitors out there – interestingly enough, they may have other uses besides lowering cholesterol. For some time, it’s been thought that such compounds might be useful antibiotics, since many bacteria need cholesterol synthesis pathways to survive. And there’s a recent report in Science putting this to the test in a particularly relevant system, particularly virulent strains of Staphylococcus aureus.
The “aureus” part of the name refers to the yellow hue that many strains of the bug exhibit, which seems to be correlated with how nasty they are as an infectious agent. The color comes from staphyloxanthin, a pigment that seems to be used as a defense agent by the bacteria by neutralizing reactive oxygen attacks from a host’s immune system. As the current work shows, the first enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway for staphyloxanthin (known as CrtM) has a lot of structural similarities to human squalene synthase. The authors prepared a number of known squalene synthase inhibitors from the literature, and found that one class of them (the phosphonosulfonates) also inhibit CrtM.
They went further, showing that one of these compounds (a BMS clinical candidate from about ten years ago) actually works quite well as an antibiotic in vitro and in an in vivo mouse model. I'm not sure why this compound didn't go further, but perhaps it (and the others in its class) will have a second life in the antiinfectives world. . .
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Drug Development | Infectious Diseases
April 3, 2008
Posted by Derek
I was having a discussion the other day about which therapeutic areas have the best predictive assays. That is, what diseases can you be reasonably sure of treating before your drug candidate gets into (costly) human trials? As we went on, things settled out roughly like this:
Cardiovascular (circulatory): not so bad. We’ve got a reasonably good handle on the mechanisms of high blood pressure, and the assays for it are pretty predictive, compared to a lot of other fields. (Of course, that’s also now one of the most well-served therapeutic areas in all of medicine). There are some harder problems, like primary pulmonary hypertension, but you could still go into humans with a bit more confidence than usual if you had something that looked good in animals.
Cardiovascular (lipids): deceptive. There aren’t any animals that handle lipids quite the way that humans do, but we’ve learned a lot about how to interpolate animal results. That plus the various transgenic models gives you a reasonable read. The problem is, we don’t really understand human lipidology and its relation to disease as well as we should (or as well as a lot of people think we do), so there are larger long-term problems hanging over everything. But yeah, you can get a new drug with a new mechanism to market. Like Vytorin.
CNS: appalling. That goes for the whole lot – anxiety, depression, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, you name it. The animal models are largely voodoo, and the mechanisms for the underlying diseases are usually opaque. The peripheral nervous system isn’t much better, as anyone who’s worked in pain medication will tell you ruefully. And all this is particularly disturbing, because the clinical trials here are so awful that you’d really appreciate some good preclinical pharmacology: patient variability is extreme, the placebo effect can eat you alive, and both the diseases and their treatments tend to progress very, very slowly. Oh, it’s just a nonstop festival of fun over in this slot. Correspondingly, the opportunities are huge.
Anti-infectives: good, by comparison. It’s not like you can’t have clinical failures in this area, but for the most part, if you can stop viruses or kill bugs in a dish, you can do it in an animal, or in a person. The questions are always whether you can do it to the right extent, and just how long it’ll be before you start seeing resistance. With antibacterials that can be, say, "before the end of your clinical trials". There aren’t as many targets here as everyone would like, and none of them is going to be a gigantic blockbuster, but if you find one you can attack it with more confidence than usual.
Diabetes: pretty good, up to a point. There are a number of well-studied animal models here, and if your drug’s mechanism fits their quirks and limitations, then you should be in fairly good shape. Not by coincidence, this is also a pretty well-served area, by current standards. If you’re trying something off the beaten path, though, a route that STZ or db/db rats won’t pick up well, then things get harder. Look out, though, because this disease area starts to intersect with lipids, which (it bears saying again) We Don't Understand Too Well.
Obesity: deceptive in the extreme. There are an endless number of ways to get rats to lose weight. Hardly any of them, though, turn out to be relevant to humans or relevant to something humans would consider paying for. (Relentless vertigo would work to throw the animals off their feed, for example, but would probably be a loser in the marketplace. Although come to think of it, there is Alli, so you never know). And the problem here is always that there are so many overlapping backup redundant pathways for feeding behavior, so the chances for any one compound doing something dramatic are, well, slim. The expectations that a lot of people have for a weight-loss therapy are so high (thanks partly to years of heavily advertised herbal scams and bizarre devices), but the reality is so constrained.
Oncology: horrible, just horrible. No one trusts the main animal models in this area (rat xenografts of tumor lines) as anything more than rough, crude filters on the way to clinical trials. And no one should. Always remember: Iressa, the erstwhile AstraZeneca wonder drug from a few years back, continues to kick over all kinds of xenograft models. It looks great! It doesn’t work in humans! And it's not alone, either. So people take all kinds of stuff into the clinic against cancer, because what else can you do? That leads to a terrifying overall failure rate, and has also led to, if you can believe it, a real shortage of cancer patients for trials in many indications.
OK, those are some that I know about from personal experience. I’d be glad to hear from folks in other areas, like allergy/inflammation, about how their stuff rates. And there are a lot of smaller indications I haven’t mentioned, many of them under the broad heading of immunology (lupus, MS, etc.) whose disease models range from “difficult to run and/or interpret” on the high side all the way down to “furry little random number generators”.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Animal Testing | Cancer | Cardiovascular Disease | Diabetes and Obesity | Drug Assays | Drug Development | Infectious Diseases | The Central Nervous System
April 2, 2008
Posted by Derek
Thanks to a tip from “Jack Friday” of the Pharmagossip blog, I’ve read this paper which appeared in Atherosclerosis this past summer. A large multi-center team put a lot of work into studying the Vytorin combination (ezetimibe and simvastain, the cholesterol absorption inhibitor and a classic HMG CoA reductase inhibitor) in 72 healthy male subjects. I was initially excited about it, because reading the abstract it seems as if they’ve found a real difference between taking the combination versus taking the drugs by themselves, which is rather a hot topic these days. But read on.
The subjects were divided into three groups, receiving 10 mg/day ezetimibe (basically Zetia monotherapy), 40 mg/day simvastatin (Zocor monotherapy) or the combination (Vytorin). The results? Well, LDL cholesterol went down in all groups, as expected – this much was known already. (Total cholesterol was down as well, but this was basically all due to LDL reduction). Ezetimibe alone lowered LDL by 22%, simvastatin by 41%, and the combination lowered it by 60%: so far, so good. Those are just the kinds of numbers that convinced people to go on Vytorin in the first place.
Cholesterol synthesis showed an interesting pattern, but one that makes sense. Simvastain lowered it, as well it should – that’s the whole rationale for a statin in the first place. But ezetimibe actually increased it, which could be interpreted as the body’s attempt to get back to previous cholesterol levels after the dietary supply was cut off. The combination was a wash, as you’d expect – the two canceled each other out. These results have been found in other studies as well.
Meanwhile, cholesterol absorption was the flip side of endogenous synthesis. Ezetimibe lowered it (again, as well it should!), and simvastatin had essentially no effect. The combination, then, showed an overall lowering of cholesterol absorption – no surprises, and this, too, has been seen in other work.
The gene for the surface LDL receptor showed a different pattern. Ezetimibe by itself didn’t do much to its expression levels, but simvatatin sent it up (and thus the combination sent it up, too). When they looked at the actual LDL-receptor protein, though, none of the three regimens had an effect. The abstract for the paper makes more out of this than the paper itself does, to my eyes. The abstract singles out the combination therapy as upregulating the gene but not protein expression, as if that were some new effect, but simvastatin alone does the exact same thing. I didn’t see anything particularly surprising here, and the bottom line is that none of the three treatments did anything to LDL receptor protein levels, which is how real clinical effects would be expected show up.
The differences these investigators found with Vytorin as compared to its two components seem to me to be either already known, completely reasonable and expected, or so small that it’s uncertain if they exist. I have a feeling that that’s why this work was published in Atherosclerosis - a perfectly good journal, mind you, but if something dramatic had shown up, I’ll bet they could have made New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, Nature Medicine or the like.
Overall, this study just seems to be confirmation of why Merck and Schering-Plough felt safe in making a big marketing play for Vytorin. If lowering LDL is good, and if lowering LDL is the reason that people take statins, then Vytorin does it even more. If you were shown these results without knowing that they were for Vytorin, you'd think that someone had discovered a real blockbuster of a new cholesterol-lowering drug. So we’re right back to asking why ENHANCE didn’t show a benefit in artery wall thickness. And that, no one knows.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease
April 1, 2008
Posted by Derek
Ezetimibe, known as Zetia and as the key component of Vytorin, was invented by friends and colleagues of mine. It was the first drug I ever saw discovered after I joined the drug industry. The initial discovery of the whole compound class happened around the corner from my lab, and the compound that became ezetimibe itself was synthesized down the hall. So, no, I’m not taking the current news about it very well. The situation is still quite confused, but there looks to have been enough stupidity, greed, and plain bad luck involved to make anyone despair. Read on – but I should warn you, I’m probably just going to get madder and madder as the post continues.
As anyone unfortunate enough to be holding Merck or Schering-Plough stock already knows, both companies took a pounding yesterday after the American College of Cardiology issued its recommendation on the use of Vytorin (ezetimibe / simvastatin). This call was based on the now-infamous ENHANCE trial, which was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The main points of the study had already come out in January, of course, but a closer look at the data has done nothing to help explain its results: no improvement over existing therapy. Addition of the cholesterol absorption inhibitor to the statin appears to have done nothing to help clear arteries (based on measurement of intima-media thickness) over what could be done with the statin alone. Ezetimibe seems to have had no bad effects, fortunately, but no good ones, either.
The ACC’s verdict is that Vytorin should only be used as a last resort, and that patients currently taking it should strongly consider going back to plain statin therapy. Based on these study results, that seems like a reasonable recommendation. There’s a large outcome trial (IMPROVE-IT) underway comparing the two treatments, but we’re not going to see results from that one for another three years at the earliest. Until then, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to recommend Vytorin. (There may not be any reason to recommend it afterwards, either, but we’ll have to wait to see about that). Fortunately for everyone involved, no one seems to have been harmed, outside of the insurance companies who have paid out for Vytorin for the last few years – they not doubt have their own views on the subject.
It’s important to remember that this result is indeed a surprise, since the combination definitely does do a better job at lowering LDL. (As an editorial in the NEJM puts it, this "dramatically contradicts our expectations"). You’d think that extra LDL reduction would be associated with a better outcome, but one of the panelists at the ACC, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, points out (PDF) that hormone therapy lowers LDL as a side effect, but isn’t associated in that case with better atherosclerosis outcomes, either. Does that mean that there’s more to the effect of statins than just lowering LDL, too? That possibility has to be taken seriously. The non-lipid effects of inhibiting HMGCoA reductase, the statin target, may be part of the answer, although the authors of the NEJM paper are reluctant to make that their whole explanation.
What they suggest instead is disturbing. The study may have been doomed from the start. The ENHANCE subjects were not taken from the general population, but rather were patients with a genetic abnormality in LDL handling, familial hypercholesterolemia. The idea was that these patients would be even more likely to show a benefit from Vytorin. But as the NEJM authors make clear, this may at one time have been a good patient population to show benefits in, but now the great majority of people with this condition are treated with statins starting at an early age. This, naturally, has an effect on their arterial walls. So the subjects of this trial may have already had a head start on reducing their arterial thickness, which means there may well have been a limit on what any particular therapy could have accomplished. Instead of being a better group to demonstrate your LDL-lowering powers in, they could well be worse.
If that’s true, there is, in fact, a chance that the IMPROVE-IT trial could show a clear benefit for Vytorin, since it’s being run in a broader population. (Just watch the confusion if that happens). But what will that mean? The results will be far too late to help Merck and Schering-Plough, and will be a clear disservice to the patients that could have benefited from the drug before then. ENHANCE would then turn out to have been a huge mistake.
But not content with that, the companies have managed to make it into a complete disaster. The controversy has been whether Merck and Schering-Plough sat on the results of the trial or spent extra time trying to find a way to make them look more appealing. This has drawn the attention of Sen. Charles Grassley and an investigative committee, which is the sort of thing that no company can wish for. Yesterday Grassley released some of the text of his letters to the management of both companies, and these include quotes from e-mails sent by John Kastelein, the lead investigator on ENHANCE. They do not look good, not by any stretch of the imagination:
” Is it correct that SP has decided not to present at AHA, but to await the two other, completely unvalidated, endpoints, which analysis is going to take us straight into 2008??!!??
If this is true, SP must have taken this decision without even the semblance of decency to consult me as PI of the study. I can tell you that if this is the case, our collaboration is over…This starts smelling like extending the publication for no other [than] political reasons and I cannot live with that.”
In another e-mail, Kastelein expresses more frustration that the results would not be presented at that AHA meeting (as indeed they weren’t, in the end), and says that ”. . . you will be seen as a company that tries to hide something and I will be perceived as being in bed with you!”
Schering-Plough, for its part, says that these statements are taken out of context, but good grief, what other context could that possibly be? Kastelein has also backed off, saying that he wasn’t accusing the company of “deliberately withholding data for political reasons”, but again, it’s hard to read those excerpts in any other way. These days, no one should make statements in e-mail that they’re not comfortable seeing printed in the Wall Street Journal, which is where I got these.
And does it need to be said that this is exactly, I mean exactly the kind of thing that the drug industry does not need? Vytorin as a drug is easy to forgive – the combination makes perfect sense, and the fact that it didn’t show a good result in ENHANCE took everyone by surprise. (And, as mentioned above, it may in the end turn out to be a good therapy in the end). But the marketing of Vytorin is perhaps another thing – the companies really made a huge aggressive push to get as much of the cholesterol-lowering market as they could. That’s no sin by itself, unless business is a sin, but if you’re going to push that hard, you’d better make sure that you’re standing on something firm.
This trial definitely wasn't that sort of foundation, and the fallout from it has been made much, much worse by its handling. It's distressing to me that the management at Merck and Schering-Plough would even take the chance, in this climate, of being seen as data-massaging study-burying slime. What words do I find if that's what they turn out to be?
Ezetimibe was (and is) a wonderful scientific story in the drug discovery labs, and its development is a testament to some very dedicated and persistent people. What a pity that it's all come to this.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Press Coverage | The Dark Side | Why Everyone Loves Us
March 13, 2008
Posted by Derek
Today (March 13) at 3 PM EST, there's a hearing scheduled on a legal motion that could change the way scientific results are published in this country. Pfizer is being sued over injuries that plaintiffs believe came from their use of Celebrex, one of the world’s only remaining Cox-2 inhibitor drugs. (I saw a Celebrex tv ad the other day, a surreal thing which was basically a lengthy recitation of FDA-mandated side effect language accompanied by jazzy graphics). Everyone with a Cox-2 compound is being sued from every direction, as a matter of course. The company is, naturally, casting around for any weapon that comes to hand for its defense, as did Merck when that same sky began to come down on them.
But Pfizer’s lawyers (DLA Piper LLP of Boston) are apparently (your choice, multiple answers permitted) more aggressive, more unscrupulous, or more clueless than Merck’s. Among the points at issue are several papers from the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the motion, which I paid to download from PACER, two of the particularly contentious ones are this one on complications after cardiac surgery and this one on cardiac risk during a colon cancer trial. So Pfizer has served the journal’s editors with a series of subpoenas. They’re seeking to open the files on these manuscripts – reviewer comments, reviewer names, editorial correspondence, rejected submissions, the lot. What are they hoping to find? Oh, who knows – whatever’s there: ”Scientific journals such as NEJM may have received manuscripts that contain exonerating data for Celebrex and Bextra which would be relevant for Pfizer's causation defense” say the lawyers. The journal refused to comply, so Pfizer has now filed a motion in district court in Massachusetts to compel them to open up.
What's particularly interesting is the the journal has, to some extent, already done so. According to Pfizer's "Motion to Compel", the editors "produced a sampling of forms identifying the names of manuscript authors and their financial disclosures, correspondence between NEJM editors and authors regarding suggested editorial changes and acceptance and rejection letters". The motion goes on to say, though, that the editors had the nerve to ignore the broader fishing expedition, only releasing documents for authors specifically named in the subpoenas, not "any and all" documents related to Celebrex or Bextra. They also withheld several documents under the umbrella of peer review and internal editoral processes. Thus, the request to open up the whole thing.
I’ve never heard of this maneuver before. Staff members of the NEJM gave depositions in the early phases of the Merck litigation, since the journal was in the middle of the Vioxx fighting. (They’d “expressed concern” several times about the studies that had appeared in their own pages and passed through their own review process). But even then, I don’t think that Merck wanted to open up the editorial files, and you’d think that if anyone had something to gain by it, they would.
Pfizer’s motion seems to me more like a SLAPP, combined with standard fishing expedition tactics. Their legal team doesn’t seem to think that any of this will be a problem, at least as far as you can tell from their public statements. They say in their motion that they don’t see any harm coming to the NEJM if they comply – heavens, why not? Reviewers will just line up to look over clinical trial publications if they think that their confidentiality can be breached in case of a lawsuit, won’t they? And the rest of the scientific publishing world could look for the same treatment, any time someone published data that might be relevant to someone’s court case, somewhere. Oh, joy.
Pfizer’s motion states that ” The public has no interest in protecting the editorial process of a scientific journal”. Now, it’s not like the peer review process is a sacred trust, but it’s the best we’ve been able to come up with so far. It reminds me of Churchill’s comment about democracy being the worst form of government until you look at the alternatives. I realize that it’s the place of trial lawyers and defense teams to scuffle around beating each other with whatever they can pick up, but I really don’t think that they should be allowed to break this particular piece of furniture.
And I can’t see how the current review process won’t get broken if Pfizer’s motion is granted. The whole issue is whether the journal's editors can claim privilege - if so, they don't have to release, and if not, they most certainly do. This can't help but set a precedent, one way or another. If there's no privilege involved in the editorial process, a lot of qualified and competent reviewers will start turning down any manuscript that might someday be involved in legal action. (Which, in the medical field, might be most of them). The public actually does have an interest in seeing that there is a feasible editorial process for scientific journals in general, and I hope that the judge rules accordingly.
In the meantime, for all my friends at Pfizer and for all the other scientists there with integrity and good sense: my condolences. Your company isn’t doing you any favors this week.
(One of the first mentions of all this was on the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog. The comments that attach to it are quite interesting, dividing between the hands-off-peer-review crowd and a bunch of people who want to see the NEJM taken down a few pegs. I can sympathize with that impulse, but there has to be a better way to do it than this. And there’s more commentary from Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, here (you can pretty much guess what he thinks about this great idea).
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | The Scientific Literature | Toxicology | Why Everyone Loves Us
March 4, 2008
Posted by Derek
Here's a snapshot for you, to illustrate how little we know about what many of our compounds can do. I was browsing the latest issue of the British Journal of Pharmacology, which is one of many perfectly respectable journals in that field, and was struck by the table of contents.
Here, for example, is a paper on Celebrex (celecoxib), but not about its role in pain or inflammation. No, this one, from a group in Turin, is studying the drug's effects on a colon cancer cell line, and finding that it affects the ability of the cells to stick to surfaces. This appears to be driven by downregulation of adhesion proteins such as ICAM-1 and VCAM-1, and that seems to have nothing particular to do with COX-2 inhibition, which is, of course, the whole reason that Celebrex exists.
This is a story that's been going on for a few years now. There's been quite a bit of study on the use of COX-2 drugs in cancer (particularly colon cancer), but that was driven by their actual COX-2 effects. Now it's to the point that people are looking at close analogs of the drugs that don't have any COX-2 effects at all, but still seem to have promise in oncology. You never know.
Moving down the list of papers, there's this one, which studies a well-known model of diabetes in rats. Cardiovascular complications are among the worst features of chronic diabetes, so these folks are looking at the effect of vascular relaxing compounds to see if they might provide some therapeutic effect. And they found that giving these diabetic rats sildenafil, better known as Viagra, seems to have helped quite a bit. They suggest that smaller chronic doses might well be beneficial in human patients, which is definitely not something that the drug was targeted for, but could actually work.
And further down, here's another paper looking at a known drug. In this case, it's another piece of the puzzle about the effects of Acomplia (rimonabant), Sanofi-Aventis's one-time wonder drug candidate for obesity. It's become clear that it (and perhaps all CB-1 compounds) may also have effects on inflammation and the immune system, and these researchers confirm that with one subtype of blood cells. It appears that rimonabant is also a novel immune modulator, which is most definitely not one of the things it was envisioned as. Do the other CB-1 compounds (such as Merck's taranabant) have such effects? No one knows, but it wouldn't come as a complete surprise, would it?
These are not unusual examples. They just serve to show how little we understand about human physiology, and how important it is to study drugs in whole living systems. You might never learn about such things by studying the biochemical pathways in isolation, as valuable as that is in other contexts. But our context in the drug industry is the real world, with real human patients, and they're going to be surprising us for a long time to come. Good surprises, and bad ones, too.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Diabetes and Obesity | Drug Development | Toxicology
February 8, 2008
Posted by Derek
There’s an excellent article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that summarizes the state of the HDL-raising drug world. It will also serve as an illustration, which can be repeated across therapeutic areas, of What We Don’t Know, and How Much We Don’t Know It.
The last big event in this drug space was the catastrophic failure of Pfizer’s torcetrapib, which wiped out deep into Phase III, taking a number of test patients and an ungodly amount of money with it. Ever since then, people have been frantically trying to figure out how this could have happened, and whether it means that the other drug candidates in this area are similarly doomed. There’s always the chance that this was a compound-specific effect, but we won’t know until we see the clinical results from those others. Until that day, if you want to know about HDL therapies, read this review.
I’d guess that if you asked a thousand random people about that Pfizer drug, most wouldn’t have heard about it, the same as with most other scientific news. But many that had might well have thought it was a cholesterol-lowering drug. Cholesterol = bad; if there’s one thing that the medical establishment has managed to get into everyone’s head, that’s it. The next layer of complexity (two kinds of cholesterol, one good, one bad) has penetrated pretty well, but not as thoroughly. A small handful of our random sample might have known, though, that torcetrapib was designed to raise HDL (“good cholesterol”).
And that’s about where knowledge of this field stops among the general population, and I can understand why, because it gets pretty ferocious after that point. As with everything else in living systems, the closer you look, the more you see. There are, for starters, several subforms of HDL, the main alpha fraction and at least three others. And there are at least four types of alpha. At least sixteen lipoproteins, enzymes, and other proteins are distributed in various ratios among all of them. We know enough to say that these different HDL particles vary in size, shape, cholesterol content, origin, distribution, and function, but we don’t know anywhere near as much as we need to about the details. There’s some evidence that instead of raising HDL across the board, what you want to do is raise alpha-1 while lowering alpha-2 and alpha-3, but we don’t really know how to do that.
How does HDL, or its beneficial fraction(s) help against atherosclerosis? We’re not completely sure about that, either. One of the main mechanisms is probably reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), the process of actually removing cholesterol from the arterial plaques and sending it to the liver for disposal. It’s a compelling story, currently thought to consist of eight separate steps involving four organ systems and at least six different enzymes. The benefits (or risks) of picking one of those versus the others for intervention are unknown. For most of those steps, we don’t have anything that can selectively affect them yet anyway, so it’s going to take a while to unravel things. Torcetrapib and the other CETP inhibitors represent a very large (and very risky) bet on what is approximately step four.
And HDL does more than reverse cholesterol transport. It also prevents platelets from aggregating and monocytes from adhering to artery walls, and it has anti-inflammatory, anti-thrombotic, and anti-oxidant effects. The stepwise mechanisms for these are not well understood, their details versus all those HDL subtypes are only beginning to be worked out, and their relative importance in HDL’s beneficial effects are unknown.
At this point, the review article begins a section titled “Further Complications”. I’ll spare you the details, but just point out that these involve the different HDL profiles (and potentially different effects) of people with diabetes, high blood pressure, and existing cardiovascular disease. If you’re thinking “But that’s exactly the patient population most in medical need”, you are correct. And if it’s occurred to you that this could mean that an HDL drug candidate’s safety profile might be even more uncertain than usual, since you won’t see these mechanisms kick in until you get deep into the clinical trials, right again. (And if you thought of that and you don’t already work in the industry, please consider coming on down and helping us out).
Much of the rest of the article is a discussion of what might have gone wrong with torcetrapib, and suffice it to say that there are many possibilities. The phrases “conflicting findings”, “remain to be elucidated”, “would be important to understand” and “will require careful analysis” feature prominently, as they damn well should. As I said at the time, we’re going to learn a lot about human lipidology from its failure, but it sure is a very painful way to learn it.
And that is the state of the art. This is exactly what the cutting edge of medical knowledge and drug discovery looks like, except for the fact that cardiovascular disease is relative well worked out compared to some of the other therapeutic areas. (Try central nervous system diseases if you want to see some real black boxes). This is what we’re up against. And if anyone wants to know how come we don’t have a good therapy yet for Disease A or Syndrome B. . .well, this is why.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Drug Development | Toxicology
January 14, 2008
Posted by Derek
Merck and Schering-Plough have released the data on a study of genetically high-LDL patients taking a statin alone (Zocor, simvastatin) or the combination of the statin and Schering-Plough's cholesterol absorption inhibitor (Vytorin, simvastatin and ezetimibe). Vytorin has a good share of the market, and has already been shown to lower cholesterol.
And so it did this time: the Vytorin patients showed a 58% decrease in LDL, while the Zocor group showed a 41% reduction. But this trial went further, looking at the growth of atherosclerotic plaques. You'd figure that a greater decrease in LDL would mean a greater decrease in the size and growth of plaques.
You'd be wrong. The Vytorin group's carotid arteries, measured in a standard way (intima-medial thickness, IMT) came out as 0.0111 mm, while the Zocor group's came out as 0.0058 mm. This is making the headlines as "twice as bad as Zocor", but the difference actually isn't statistically significant (p = 0.29). Steve Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic is quoted as saying that this is "as bad a result for the drug as anybody could have feared", but that's not quite right. If that p value had been, say, 0.01, that would be worse. Strictly speaking, you can't call the two groups different. They don't seem to have been different in cardiovascular outcomes.
But here's the real point: that's bad enough. The whole point of Vytorin is that it's supposed to be more effective than a statin alone, and what you can say about this trial is that it sure didn't prove that. But that carotid artery thickness is definitely a concern - the numbers appear to have big error bars on them, but they're certainly not pointing in a good direction. And it's going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, to ever know if that effect is real, because it'll be mighty hard to get another trial of this sort off the ground after results like this. How can you enroll a treatment group for a drug that has been shown to have no benefit?
Well, OK, there's that LDL reduction. But the downstream clinical data (the artery measurements and outcomes) overrule that. The point of taking a cholesterol medication is not to make your lab test numbers go up and down, the point is to have fewer heart attacks and strokes. We use those blood lipid numbers as a convenient surrogate, but it's been obvious for a long time now that we have, to put it delicately, an imperfect understanding of their relevance. Data closer to real mortality and morbidity outcomes will win.
Now what? This is clearly terrible news for Merck and (especially) for Schering Plough. The companies already were under pressure for having taken so long to work up the data for this trial, which delay ended up just drawing even more attention to these bad results. Now, how do you go out and sell Vytorin (or Zetia, the cholesterol absorption inhibitor alone)? Why do insurance companies have motivation to pay for it? And when are we ever going to understand the complexities human lipid behavior and cardiology?
More on ezetimibe, written in happier days, here , here, here, and here. .
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September 2, 2007
Posted by Derek
I notice that the first marketed renin inhibitor seems to be doing fairly well. That's an interesting phrase, "first marketed renin inhibitor". . .
This is a good example of what drug discovery can be like. Renin is a fine drug target – it’s been known for a long time as a key component of blood pressure regulation, and that’s a condition affecting a huge market whose treatment provides a real medical benefit. What more do you want?
OK, let’s make it even more attractive. It’s not that hard to set up a renin assay, and the protein is well-studied. The counterscreens and secondary assays are not a problem; hypertension is fairly well understood. And if you screen for renin inhibitors, you generally find chemical matter to start off with, too. Protease inhibitors vary quite a bit in their drug-likeness, but they’re certainly not impossible on the face of them.
But even after all this, I would not like to be asked to count how many renin inhibitors have been reported over the years, never to be seen again. The first reports I can find go back to the early 1980s. Given the lead time for these things, I can safely assume that these compounds were being made around the time I went the my high school Junior Prom (theme: “Saturday Night Fever”, natch – it was 1978, after all). And here we are in 2007, and the first one has finally made it to market. It wasn't easy, either - the compound was left for dead years ago, and was only kept going by some ex-Novartis people who started their own company and licensed the compound back to Novartis when it finally made it through the rough spots.
So, what’s the problem? Many compounds have been done in by poor behavior in living models (distribution, absorption, and so on). Getting oral bioavailability in this area has been a lot harder than anyone thought, and even the current drug is no great winner in that category. Projects start and stop, difficulties occur, and the years go by. And other mechanisms for going after hypertension have, of course, come to market, starting with the ACE inhibitors (which come from roughly the same disco era as the first run of renin compounds). They took the gigantic market that an early-1980s renin inhibitor would have had, but even so, I don’t think a year has gone by since that someone in the industry hasn’t been working on one. (There's still room to think that a renin compound would have a better profile than the existing drugs, though). And here we are: 2007. A sobering thought, that is.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Drug Development | Drug Industry History
June 11, 2007
Posted by Derek
The FDA briefing documents for Wednesday's discussion of Accomplia / Zimulti (rimonabant) have been posted, and they're an interesting read indeed. As everyone in the industry knows, this drug was once looked on as the next potential record-breaker, and writing the first part of this sentence in that verb form tells you a lot about what's happened since. It's the first antagonist targeting the cannabinoid CB-1 receptor, and at one point it looked like it was going to make people lose their excess weight, shed their addictions, and for all I know refinance their mortgages.
But then the delays hit in the US - long, long ones, delays which made fools of everyone who tried to predict when they would be over. And the drug meanwhile made it to market in Europe, where it has very quietly done not very much.
Now we may be seeing some of the reasons for the FDA'a "approvable" letter over a year ago. It's not efficacy - the FDA's briefing summary states that:
"Rimonabant 20 mg daily vs. placebo was associated with statistically and clinically
significant weight loss. Rimonabant 5 mg daily vs. placebo was associated with
statistically significant but clinically insignificant weight loss. . .rimonabant 20 mg daily vs. placebo was associated with a statistically significant 8% increase in HDL-C and a statistically significant 12% decrease in TG levels. There were no significant improvements in levels of total or LDL-C in the rimonabant 20 mg daily vs. placebo group. . .rimonabant 20 mg compared with placebo was associated with a statistically significant 0.7% reduction in HbA1c in overweight and obese subjects with type 2 diabetes taking either metformin or a sulfonylurea."
Not bad - just the sort of thing you'd want to go after the whole obesity/diabetes/cardiovascular area, you'd think. But the problem is in the side effects, and one in particular:
"The incidence of suicidality – specifically suicidal ideation – was higher for 20 mg
rimonabant compared to placebo. Similarly, the incidence of psychiatric adverse events,
neurological adverse events and seizures were consistently higher for 20 mg rimonabant compared to placebo. . ."
They're also concerned about other neurological side effects, and seizures as well. The seizure data don't look nearly as worrisome, except in the obese diabetic patients, for whom everything seems to be amplified. And all of this happens at the 20-mg dose, not at the 5 (which doesn't do much for weight, either, as noted above). And for those who are wondering, yes, on my first pass through the data, I find these statistics much more convincing than I did the ones on the Avandia (rosiglitazone) association with cardiac events.
I had my worries about rimonabant a long time ago, but not for any specific reason. It's just that I used to work on central nervous system drugs, and you have to be ready for anything. Any new CNS mechanism, I figured, might well set off some things that no one was expecting, given how little we understand about that area.
But isn't it good to finally hear what the arguing is about? Sanofi-Aventis has been relentlessly tight-lipped about everything to do with the drug. I can see why, after looking at the FDA documents, but this isn't a problem that's going to go away by not talking about it. The advisory committee meeting is Wednesday. Expect fireworks.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Diabetes and Obesity | The Central Nervous System | Toxicology
May 31, 2007
Posted by Derek
GlaxoSmithKline is breaking out the data to respond to the Nissen and Wolski NEJM paper on the possible cardiovascular risks of Avandia (rosiglitazone). In a letter published by The Lancet (PDF), the company's chief medical officer, Ronald Krall, defends the drug (and the company):
"GlaxoSmithKline did similar meta-analyses in 2005 and 2006 and found hazard ratios in the same direction as Nissen and Wolski. However, all these results are highly dependent on the methods used and the studies included, given the small number of events reported. For example, the actual number of myocardial infarctions in the Nissen and Wolski meta-analysis yields a very low frequency of events (0·6%), and the absolute difference in rates of myocardial infarctions between rosiglitazone and controls is less than 0·1%.
These observations support a view expressed by Nissen and Wolski them-selves: “a meta-analysis is always considered less convincing than a large prospective trial designed to assess the outcome of interest.”
He then goes back over the data in the three large trials that bear on the question. Reanalyzed data from the ADOPT study still do not show a statistically meaningful cardiovascular risk for rosiglitazone versus the other two diabetes drugs in the trial (metformin and glibenclamide). (There's no placebo group - this is one of those head-to-head comparisons of a drug versus its strongest competitors, a type of study that some people believe never takes place). The second completed study, DREAM, looked at co-administration of rosiglitazone and the ACE inhibitor ramapril. There were four groups - placebo only, rosi and placebo, ramapril and placebo, and rosi plus ramapril. The first three showed no difference in cardiovascular events, but the last one did, for unknown reasons.
These two studies are in the Nissen/Wolski meta-analysis, of course, but as I noted originally, it was the sum of the smaller studies that gave them their cardiovascular warning. But when the statistically less powerful trials show one thing that isn't borne out by the larger ones, the issue is (at the very least) still in doubt. The letter also points out that the company's database mining of managed-care patients taking rosi has shown no increase in cardiovascular risks.
Other controlled studies are ongoing, the (now highly awaited) RECORD and another one called ACCORD. Both are designed from the start to address cardiovascular outcomes (which are a major complication in diabetic patients). Krall's letter lifts the veil a tiny bit on RECORD, saying that the independent review board has now completed an interim analysis of its cardiovascular data and concluded that the trial should continue. This would not be the case, you'd have to presume, were the numbers to clearly show increased CV deaths in the treatment group.
My take on this is that the company has a pretty strong case so far, certainly strong enough to wait for the ongoing trials to settle the issue. What never fails to disappoint me, though, is the way that stories like this are jammed into ready-made templates. Depending on the editorial writer, the appearance of the NEJM paper became "FDA Corrupt, Broken: Snores While Dangerous Drugs Kill Thousands", or "Giant Drug Company Sells Heart Attack Poison, Doesn't Give Hoot". Or maybe just "Drug Approval System Completely Broken - Again".
Now, Steve Nissen does sound the alarm a lot, but I have no doubt that his intentions are honorable. His paper, to me, was the equivalent of saying "Hey, you people may have a problem here. Did you know that?" GSK's response, then is "Yeah, we've looked at that, too, but we don't see it. Are you sure your numbers are good?" Meanwhile, the studies which should answer the question for good are already years into their runs. If this is our standard for a broken drug approval system, we've certainly become mighty fastidious over the years. For what it's worth, The Lancet agrees.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Diabetes and Obesity | Press Coverage
May 25, 2007
Posted by Derek
Insider, author of the Pharmagossip site, sent along this link to an article on Avandia at the Health Care Renewal site, flagged as "essential reading". After looking it over, I don't think I agree, and I thought it might be worthwhile to explain why.
The HCR piece quotes extensively from this New York Times article, headlined "Years Ago, Agency Was Warned of a Drug's Risks". Its focus is a letter that Dr. John Buse of UNC (now president-elect of the American Diabetes Association) sent to the FDA in 2000 on the possible cardiovascular risks of Avandia. Reading HCR's summary is a somewhat different experience than reading the original article, though - for one thing, you miss out on the part about how even now Dr. Buse isn't calling for Avandia to be be taken off the market. Rather than finding the Nissen New England Journal of Medicine paper to be the smoking gun he's been waiting for, he advocates waiting for the GSK cardiovascular risk study to be completed before making any decisions.
The HCR article has some good points in it, but to my ear they're phrased oddly. For example, it advocates a skeptical attitude toward the marketing claims made by drug companies, which is very good advice. But that's very good advice for evaluating the marketing claims of companies in every other industry, too. They're trying to sell you something. They will present their product in the most favorable light possible, whether that product is a car, a diabetes drug, or a burrito.
And that's the part that drives some people crazy, because it seems wrong to have potential life-saving drugs handled the same way as pickup trucks and enchiladas. They're not, though: the reason we can argue about drug company marketing is that drugs already have something that almost no other product has, which is a body of statistically valid comparison data. No data exist as to the long-term advantages and disadvantages of consuming a given brand of burrito versus its competition or versus an alternative meal. Cars are somewhat more data-rich, thanks to government and insurance company testing, and frequency-of-repair databases like those kept by Consumer Reports. But that's about the highest standard for comparison data outside of the drug industry, and you'll look in vain for P values and other tests of statistical significance, because there aren't any. In short, marketing claims in virtually every other industry can go relatively unchallenged, because there's little to measure them against.
So, that's why one of the things that I dislike about the Health Care Renewal piece is the hand-rubbing now-we've-got-'em tone that I detect in it. You don't have to go far to find it from plenty of other sources, either, which is why people like me are perhaps too touchy on the subject.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Diabetes and Obesity | Press Coverage | Why Everyone Loves Us
May 24, 2007
Posted by Derek
Steve Nissen has (once again) made waves with an analysis of cardiovascular risk. This time the subject is Avandia (rosiglitazone), a therapy for diabetes that's the oldest PPAR-gamma drug on the market. A meta-analysis of 42 reported clinical trials of the drug led to the conclusion that rosiglitazone is associated with a statistically significant risk of cardiac events.
The similarities to the Vioxx situation are what have made headlines (and what sent GlaxoSmithKline's stock down about 8% on the day the paper was released). But there are some important differences. Merck's ran into the Vioxx numbers in their own clinical data - the arguing has been whether they recognized the effects earlier (or should have), but it was a specific trial of theirs that led to the statistics that sank the drug. A meta-analysis is a much different beast, since you're trying to fit a large number of different trials, run in different ways for different reasons, into the same framework. Not everyone trusts them, even when the analysis is performed by someone as competent as Nissen, who does mention the limitations of the approach in the paper:
"Our study has important limitations. We pooled the results of a group of trials that were not originally intended to explore cardiovascular outcomes. Most trials did not centrally adjudicate cardiovascular outcomes, and the definitions of myocardial infarction were not available. Many of these trials were small and short-term, resulting in few adverse cardiovascular events or deaths. Accordingly, the confidence intervals for the odds ratios for myocardial infarction and death from cardiovascular causes are wide, resulting in considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of the observed hazard. Furthermore, we did not have access to original source data for any of these trials. Thus, we based the analysis on available data from publicly disclosed summaries of events. The lack of availability of source data did not allow the use of more statistically powerful time-to-event analysis. A meta-analysis is always considered less convincing than a large prospective trial designed to assess the outcome of interest."
And that's what's happening here. A number of people at large diabetes treatment centers aren't ready to buy into a cardiovascular risk for Avandia yet, because they're wary of the statistics. There's a large cardiovascular outcome trial of the drug going on now, which won't wrap up until 2009, but several people seem to want to wait for that as a more definitive answer.
If Nissen's data hold up - and statistically, I'm definitely not up to the task of evaluating his approach - then we might be looking at a Vioxx-like risk level. Out of some 14,000 patients on the drug in the various studies, there were 86 heart attacks in the treatment groups, and 72 in the controls. That comes out to be statistically significant, but (as you can see) the problem is that Type II diabetics have a high background rate of CV problems. Looking at Nissen's Table IV, it also seems clear that most of the significance he's found comes from the pooling of the smaller studies. The larger trials are nowhere near as clear-cut, which makes you wonder if this effect is real or an artifact.
I'm certainly not prepared to say one way or another, and I just hope that the ongoing trial settles the question. It's certainly not unreasonable to imagine a PPAR gamma drug having this side effect, but if this were a strong mechanism-based phenomenon the numbers would surely be stronger. If a risk is confirmed, though, we'll then be faced with a risk-benefit question. Does the glycemic control that Avandia provides lead to enough good outcomes to offset any cardiovascular risk over a large population? If you think getting the current numbers is a tough job, wait until you try to work that one out.
Comments (19)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Clinical Trials | Diabetes and Obesity | Toxicology
April 1, 2007
Posted by Derek
There's a good article at Forbeson the various attempts to improve cardiac outcomes by raising HDL levels. Matthew Herper and Robert Langreth round up the latest disappointing results, starting with Pfizer's torcetrapib and going on from there. It isn't an appealing sight.
You'd have thought that raising HDL would be a lot more effective than this, wouldn't you? Think of all the associated evidence that's piled up over the years saying that high HDL levels are cardioprotective. We in the industry have been betting hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on the hope that we knew enough to make useful drugs out of this information, and by golly, we appear to have been wrong.
This is just one more example, in what appears to be a literally endless series, of how scientific issues get more complicated the more you learn about them. There is clearly an awful lot that we just don't understand about HDL and cardiac risk, for example. Trying to treat the varying distributions of the many different sorts of HDL particles as if they were all one unit has not been fruitful, to put it mildly, so right in front of us the field divides, branches, and fans out into fuzziness: How many different sorts of HDL are there, and how do we tell them apart? What causes different types to be produced or eliminated? What time scale does this happen on, and how do all these things vary between individuals and populations? What do the various HDL species do, individually and in concert, to affect atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular conditions? How on earth can we come up with drugs to differentiate among them, assuming we ever figure out which ones to go after? We are remarkably far away from answers to any of these questions.
Our business is already dependent to an unnerving degree on rolls of invisible dice. If anyone gets an HDL-directed therapy to work in the next few years, their success will surely have an even greater share of plain good luck in it than usual. We're all going to have to know a lot more about lipoproteins before we can safely reach for our wallets in this area. For now, an awful lot of development money has been irrevocably shredded, and earning it back will be quite the job.
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Cardiovascular Disease | Drug Development
March 20, 2007
Posted by Derek
Pfizer's enormous torcetrapib failure last fall wasn't the only time a company has come to grief in the cardiovascular area, and it's not going to be the last one, either. That's been proven this week by a much smaller company, Atherogenics, and their lead drug, AGI-1067 (partnered with AstraZeneca).
The company is targeting expression of the VCAM-1 protein in blood vessels. That's an immunoglobin that seems to be involved in the adhesion of various blood cell types to the vessel walls, and as such is considered a very interesting target for atherosclerosis. AtheroGenics has been working on a series of drug candidates that interfere with the expression of VCAM-1 (through blocking an oxidative pathway in the endothelial cells) and could thus slow the development of arterial plaques (or reduce the size of plaques that had already formed).
Such is the hope, anyway. AGI-1067 behaved well in animal models, and went through numerous Phase I trials in combination with other cardiovascular agents. That link will also take you through the Phase IIa and IIb trials, which showed some real effects in reduction of plaque volume. Those results led to this Phase III trial (with the acronymn ARISE), which expanded the number and variety of patients while looking at real-world endpoints.
That's just how things should work. You see if the drug is tolerated, alone and with the therapies it's going to be given with. Then you check some primary endpoints, to see if the mechanism you're targeting is really being affected. Finally, you see if that's actually going to do a real number of patients any good: I, II, and III. And, unfortunately, III is where the Atherogenics drug ran into trouble.
They missed their primary endpoint, which was a composite score of cardiovascular adverse events - death, heart attack, stroke, angina, etc. Overall, AGI-1067 was no better than placebo when given along with the standard drugs for this patient population. There's no way to call that good news, and no one's even trying. At |
