Novartis'' blockbuster drug for leukemia

Novartis, the $17 billion
27 January 2001

Novartis, the $17 billion in sales pharmaceutical giant forged four years ago by the merger of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, is moving at a frenetic pace to introduce, what it considers, a block buster drug that will provide immense relief to people suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).

CML is an insidious cancer that starts out as a genetic flaw, which causes overproduction of platelets and white blood cells. Once set in, the disease over four to six years the genetically defective cells slowly accumulate more mutations, eventually crowding out the good cells as a result of which the body can no longer fight infection.

Traditionally, the only cure for CML has been a bone marrow transplant. With patients being unable to find a suitable donor the procedure, which costs $150,000, is generally out of reach for most of the suffering patients.

It is in this background that Novartis' new find, Glivec, is seen as a ray of hope not only for the suffering patients, but also for Novartis, which has long been considered a slumbering laggard in the global pharmaceuticals sweepstakes.

The first breakthrough for the drug designed to attack the molecular machinery that drives CML was made in a Ciba-Geigy research lab in Switzerland. Like most pharma research products, which are based on serendipity, researchers were not focusing on leukemia. But one of the compounds produced at the lab was discovered useful in disabling the defective protein made by the CML gene.

Novartis, which began testing Glivec on patients in the summer of 1998, was surprised by the spectacular results the drug produced. At the first test, all 31 patients who were given high doses, reported normal blood cell counts after only a few weeks after taking the drug. In another trial over 290 patients who were given Glivec for at least six months, 56 per cent saw the drug destroying most or all of the marrow cells with the defective gene.