Pfizer anticipates its cancer drug Lorbrena to exceed $1 billion in annual sales by 2030 as the pharma major’s data showed that most patients treated for a rare form of advanced lung cancer in a clinical trial were alive without the disease worsening after five years, news agency Reuters reported on Friday, May 31. Lorbrena, like Pfizer's Xalkori, is designed to treat cancer with a mutation of a specific gene called anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK), the report added.
As many as 60% of ALK-positive patients with advanced lung cancer who were treated with Lorbrena showed no signs of disease progression after five years, according to follow-up results from Pfizer's Phase 3 CROWN trial unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, the Reuters report said.
This is in stark contrast to the five-year progression-free survival of just 8% of patients treated with Xalkor, it further said, while adding that about 53% of Lorbrena patients whose cancer had spread to the brain at the start of the trial were alive without disease progression after five years, the data also showed.
"We believe this is a blockbuster opportunity for Pfizer. We believe it's a very different opportunity than Xalkori," Reuters quoted Chief Oncology Officer (COO) Chris Boshoff as saying in an interview.
Xalkori never reached sales of more than $1 billion annually.
Boshoff said China would be a particularly important market for Lorbrena. While 4% of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients globally have ALK-positive tumours, in China the number is up to 7%. NSCLC is the most common type of lung cancer, the Reuters report added.
Lorbrena won US approval in March of 2021 and clocked sales of $164 million in the first quarter of 2024, up 46% from a year earlier. Pfizer expects double-digit growth to continue in the coming quarters.
In February, the New York-based drugmaker had said its cancer unit would have at least eight blockbuster drugs by 2030, up from five currently.