Pharma Cooperates to Achieve Precision Medicine

The challenges of adapting drug development to the age of personalized therapies encourage collaboration among industry players.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 8 min read

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In 2003, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first targeted therapy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). AstraZeneca’s Iressa (gefitinib) had shrunk some patients’ tumors in small clinical trials, and despite some concern about the robustness of the results, regulators OK’d the therapy as an option for patients when chemotherapy and other generalized cancer-attacking treatments had failed. But after only a few months on the market, it was clear that something was amiss: for up to 90 percent of patients, the drug simply didn’t work.

While AstraZeneca struggled to explain this disappointing outcome, within a year three academic groups independently came to the same conclusion: gefitinib, it appeared, was only effective in patients harboring certain mutations in EGFR, a gene coding for ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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