Seattle Genetics Digs Deeper Into the Proverbial Haystack
Summary
Like most any drugmaker would do in this situation, Seattle Genetics and its partner, Millennium, have some conventional trials underway that seek to expand the use of the product to broader groups of patients with earlier stages of disease.But if Seattle Genetics is successful with this approach, it could not only expand its addressable market, but also prompt patients to start thinking of themselves as having “a CD30 positive malignancy” instead of Hodgkin’s disease or anaplastic large cell lymphoma.The company has been working internally to develop a diagnostic test that can look at a tumor biopsy sample in a standard pathology lab and determine the extent to which CD30 is overexpressed on the surface of the cells.As Siegall and Reynolds acknowledged, this study is more about helping Seattle Genetics and researchers form hypotheses about where to test Adcetris in the future than it is about gathering bulletproof evidence in favor of the drug.But David Miller, president of Biotech Stock Research in Seattle, said this approach could provide a strong rationale for future clinical trials, and those studies could be attractive because they are likely to be shorter, less risky, and cheaper than investors are accustomed to.