BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Xalkori's footsteps

Pfizer's Xalkori for lung cancer shows path for ultra-targeted drugs

September 19, 2011 7:00 AM UTC

The development and approval of Xalkori crizotinib from Pfizer Inc. blazes a trail for companies with other ultra-targeted compounds to follow. But Xalkori's speed to market for NSCLC was made possible by a bit of luck in matching the right drug with patients with the right mutations; for most drugs this will take a proactive effort.

Pharmacogenetics companies and clinical researchers say sequencing has improved sufficiently to enable routine, large-scale screening for mutations that define subpopulations as narrow as that served by Xalkori, which received accelerated approval in August to treat the 3-5% of non-small cell lung cancer patients who have an ALK translocation...