Month: May 2024

Pfizer said it expects its cancer drug Lorbrena to top $1 billion in annual sales by 2030 on the strength of data presented on Friday showing most patients treated for a rare form of advanced lung cancer in a clinical trial were alive without the disease worsening after five years.

Lorbrena, like Pfizer’s Xalkori, is designed to treat cancer with a mutation of a specific gene called anaplastic lymphoma kinase, or ALK.

Sixty percent of ALK-positive patients with advanced lung cancer who were treated with Lorbrena had no disease progression after five years, according to follow-up results from the company’s Phase 3 CROWN trial unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

That compared with five-year progression-free survival of just 8% of patients treated with Xalkori.

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About 53% of Lorbrena patients whose cancer had spread to the brain at the start of the trial were alive without disease progression after five years, the data also showed.

“We believe this is a blockbuster opportunity for Pfizer,” Chief Oncology Officer Chris Boshoff said in an interview.

With “increased uptake, increased market penetration, longer duration of treatment, many more patients tested” for ALK mutations, Boshoff said, “we believe it’s a very different opportunity than Xalkori,” which never reached blockbuster sales of more than $1 billion annually.

Boshoff said China would be a particularly important market for Lorbrena. While 4% of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients globally have ALK-positive tumors, up to 7% of patients in China do. NSCLC is the most common type of lung cancer.

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Boshoff also noted that many patients in Pfizer’s clinical trials have been on Lorbrena for more than 5 years, compared to median progression-free survival of 10 to 11 months for Xalkori.

Lorbrena, which won U.S. approval in March of 2021, had sales of $164 million in the first quarter of 2024, up 46% from a year earlier. The company expects double-digit growth to continue in coming quarters, Boshoff said.

Investors have fled from Pfizer as billions of dollars in COVID-19 vaccine and treatment sales disappeared with waning pandemic concerns.

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The company responded with a $43 billion purchase of cancer drugmaker Seagen, cost cuts, and an internal restructuring that prioritized its cancer drugs.

In February, the New York-based drugmaker said its cancer unit would have at least eight blockbuster drugs by 2030, up from five currently.

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Hang up the ripped bodices, give Fabio the bad news and cue the lawyers: the Romance Writers of America, a nonprofit devoted to helping romance writers build their careers, is headed to bankruptcy court.

As with so many affairs of the heart, trouble started in a hotel, or more precisely with hotel bills for the organization’s flagship annual conference, which the group said it could not pay in its bankruptcy filing on Wednesday in Houston, Texas.

RWA membership has declined sharply due to recent controversies over diversity within the organization and the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented it from holding in-person events in 2020 and 2021, according to court documents.

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Before 2019, RWA had 10,000 members, but membership has dropped to about 2,000. The organization’s declining membership meant that its long-term conference commitments were “threatening RWA’s ability to continue to operate,” according to its court filings.

The organization estimated that it owes roughly $3 million to the hotels that host its annual writers’ conference and about $74,500 in cash to other creditors. It plans to use its bankruptcy to eliminate the debt to the hotels, and instead institute a three-year payment plan that directs all of the organization’s disposable income to the hotels and other creditors.  

RWA said in a statement it expects a “swift resolution” to its bankruptcy restructuring, which “will not impact its day-to-day operations” of providing training and other resources to its members.

The organization signed a long-term contract for its flagship annual writers’ conference in 2018, locking it in to agreements with Marriott hotels around the U.S. But as membership declined, RWA tried to cancel or renegotiate its now-excessive contracts, with only partial success.

The hotel that hosted RWA’s most recent conference has sought more than $700,000 from RWA because it sold fewer rooms than RWA had reserved, and the group expects to lose money on its upcoming 2024 conference in Austin, Texas, as well. RWA also faces a $1 million contract termination demand from the Philadelphia Marriott that is slated to host RWA’s 2025 conference.

RWA has been roiled by controversies over diversity in recent years, and it acknowledged that it had “lost the trust of our membership and the romance community” in a 2019 statement.

RWA reconstituted its board, canceled its 2020 awards program and pledged to improve its record on diversity after it suffered backlash for ousting a board member who had criticized other writers’ work for containing negative racial stereotypes. The organization also renamed its annual awards program to emphasize its connection to RWA founder Vivian Stephens, a Black editor who championed women of color in the romance writing community. 

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Those changes failed to prevent further criticism in 2021, when the organization gave an award to a historical romance novel with a protagonist who took part in the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota men, women and children at the Battle of Wounded Knee. RWA rescinded the award. 

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Each year, “Teacher Appreciation Week” is observed during the month of May — and for one preschool teacher in Washington state, her “appreciation” came in the form of some good luck from the universe. 

A resident of Edmonds, Washington identified only as “J.C.” stopped at a Safeway grocery store on May 11 to get coffee with her mother before a day of running errands, Washington’s Lottery said in a May 31 press release. 

Edmonds is north of Seattle.

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While at the store, J.C. bought a scratch-off lottery ticket at a vending machine, using $10 she’d won from another scratch-off ticket. 

J.C. then put the ticket for the “$200,000 Cash Stacks” scratch-off game in her purse, temporarily forgetting about it. 

Later that night, J.C. was watching TV when she remembered she had not yet scratched off the lottery ticket she purchased, said Washington’s Lottery. 

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“When she saw one of her numbers matched the winning number on the ticket for the $200,000 prize, she was in disbelief,” said the lottery in a press release.

Not able to believe her own eyes, J.C. used Washington’s Lottery app to check that she had indeed won the game’s top prize — and for good measure, asked her mother to look at it as well.

“They both were speechless,” said Washington’s Lottery.

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With her big win, J.C. told Washington’s Lottery that she plans on buying herself a new car and traveling to Ireland, a place she’s always wanted to visit. 

The $200,000 Cash Stacks game has one remaining $200,000 prize, said Washington’s Lottery’s website. 

Hundreds of thousands of other prizes, ranging from $10 to $500, are also up for grabs.

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The overall odds of winning any sort of prize in the game are 1 in 3.43, said Washington’s Lottery.

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Washington’s Lottery was created in 1982, said its website. 

Since that time, the lottery has generated more than $5 billion for various state programs, including the Washington College Grant and the Washington Opportunity Pathways Account, the website said. 

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