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"We can't help but feel encouraged for other agents in development," she wrote to investors, "particularly in light of the failure" of a study of experimental cancer vaccine Stimuvax, being tested by Merck KGaA of Germany. She noted Dendreon Corp. already sells a vaccine to treat prostate cancer, Provenge, and a handful of other companies have therapeutic vaccines against breast, pancreatic and brain cancers in late-stage testing. UBS Securities analyst Matthew Roden noted T-VEC's 16 percent durable response rate in this study, as well as its 58 percent one-year survival rate in an earlier, mid-stage study, both exceed study results for Yervoy, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s melanoma drug. Roden added that T-VEC doesn't have that drug's severe gastrointestinal side effects. Yervoy, approved in the U.S. two years ago, was the first drug shown to prolong survival in patients with advanced melanoma. Testing showed its one-year survival rate was 46 percent, according to Roden. Melanoma is the most aggressive skin cancer. It's the cause of 75 percent of all skin cancer deaths, even though the roughly 132,000 new melanoma cases around the world each year amount to less than 5 percent of all skin cancer cases. Roden wrote to investors that the positive survival trends shown with T-VEC must be strong or Amgen wouldn't have disclosed the trend information publicly. If the drug is approved, he wrote, it could become a preferred treatment over Yervoy and surpass it in sales. Yervoy had $706 million in sales last year, nearly double what it produced in 2011.
[Associated
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