"It is extremely gratifying to have gone though the first laboratory determinations, to clinical trials, and to see Herceptin impact on increasing survival. That is a hard endpoint to obtain, and it feels good!" says Dennis Slamon, the cell biologist and oncologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine who spent a decade shepherding the drug through the pipeline, a goal that many thought would never be reached. Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco, Calif., markets the drug. The cosmetics company Revlon established the Revlon/UCLA Women's Cancer Research program, which infused $13 million between 1989 and 1997 to the drug's development.
Herceptin is a humanized monoclonal antibody (MAb) targeted against Her-2/neu, a cell surface receptor protein that is abnormally abundant in 25 to 30 percent of breast cancers. MAbs were the darlings of the dawning of modern biotech in the 1980s and were promoted heavily as the ...
