King can­cer: The top 10 ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas in bio­phar­ma R&D

It’s not go­ing to come as a sur­prise to any­one who’s been pay­ing at­ten­tion to drug R&D trends that can­cer is the num­ber 1 dis­ease in terms of new drug de­vel­op­ment projects. But it is amaz­ing to see ex­act­ly how much on­col­o­gy dom­i­nates the in­dus­try as nev­er be­fore.

At a time the first CAR-T looks to be on the thresh­old of a pi­o­neer­ing ap­proval and the first wave of PD-(L)1 drugs are spurring hun­dreds of com­bi­na­tion stud­ies, can­cer ac­count­ed for 8,651 of the to­tal num­ber of pipeline projects count­ed by the Analy­sis Group, crunch­ing the num­bers in a new re­port com­mis­sioned by PhRMA. That’s more than a third of the 24,389 pre­clin­i­cal through Phase III pro­grams tracked by Eval­u­atePhar­ma, which pro­vid­ed the data­base for this re­view.

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