Shares in FTSE 100 pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca (AZN) jumped 4.7% to £75.67 after it announced its cancer drug Lynparza had been approved in Japan.
The approvals by the Japanese Ministry of Health for the drug, which treats advanced ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers, followed positive phase three trials published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
AstraZeneca has co-developed the drug with US pharmaceutical company Merck & Co.
‘EVOLVING ERA OF PERSONALISED MEDICINE’
Roy Baynes, chief medical officer at Merck Research Laboratories said the approval for drugs like Lynparza will help pharmaceutical firms ‘advance this evolving era of personalised medicine’.
He said, ‘For patients in Japan diagnosed with each of these types of cancer there are very few treatment options.
‘Approvals for treatments such as Lynparza, the first PARP inhibitor to be approved in these specific types of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and metastatic pancreatic cancer in Japan, enable us to advance this evolving era of personalised medicine and change how these cancers are treated.’
COVID VACCINE LATEST
Meanwhile in an interview with the Sunday Times, AstraZeneca’s chief executive Pascal Soriot quelled fears over what appeared to be lower efficacy rate for its coronavirus vaccine with Oxford University compared to the ones developed by Pfizer and Moderna, and said the firm has found the ‘winning formula’.
Trials of the vaccine showed an efficacy rate of 90% when people were given half a dose followed by a whole dose at least a month later.
When two full doses were given at least a month apart, the vaccine had an efficacy of 62%, meaning that when all the results were taken into account, the overall efficacy was 70%. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were shown to be 95% and 94.5% effective respectively.
But Soriot said, ‘We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else.’
The vaccine is reportedly close to getting approval from UK regulators, and Dr Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, told Sky News the vaccine ‘looks really promising and it also looks very deliverable.’
He added, ‘We have huge optimism that this is a major part of how we can control the current surge.’
