AstraZeneca starting with cancer's earliest stages

José Baselga, the new cancer research chief at AstraZeneca, seems to be upending the standard model for oncologic drug development: Instead of pursuing therapies that treat patients in the most desperate stages of the disease, he wants to find treatments for cancer while it’s still in its early stages. The rationale, as he tells the Wall Street Journal, is that cancer is much easier to cure when it’s caught early. “It’s a deep philosophical belief that we have,” he said.

(Baselga, who seems to be doing a bit of a media tour of late, was also featured in a Bloomberg piece just last week.)

Of the 30 drugs approved for solid tumor indications since 2014, only two have been for early cancers. This unmet need, as it were, could mean the market for such drugs is vast. Baselga is now tasking his teams with orders to test “every single new compound” in its efficacy in treating early stage cancer. 

But there are hurdles — particularly because when cancer is caught early, it is already fairly treatable. So any new pharmacological entrants into this arena would need to be even more effective than the drugs already out there.