Chapter 2 - Market research in cancer therapeutics: New and generic product development

Abstract

In today’s competitive world, there are several strategies to deal with the fast changing environment, among which New product development (NPD) is a universal approach. Yet there is a risk that resources and labor spent on NPD products might fail. This concern is common in the pharmaceutical industry due to large investments, long development time, low success rate, and market uncertainty. Success factors in NPD are similar for the generic and bio-generic pharmaceutical industries. Out of 56 million deaths worldwide in 2004, cancer comprises 12%. Cancer had emerged as a major public health problem in developed and developing nation. At that time, there was a large and dynamic pipeline of products. The distribution of therapeutics in clinical trials across cancer types seems to correlate with the incidence of those cancer types (lung cancer, prostate cancer, Breast cancer and colorectal cancer) reasonably well, suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry is appropriately matching its resources to the size of the market. Chemotherapy is the predominant form of systemic treatment due to its targeted destruction of cancerous cells in any part of the body. However, its effectiveness is often hampered by the blood–brain barrier in cases of brain metastases. Depending on the requirement, it can be applied alone or in addition to other therapy systems like radiation therapy to specific metastatic sites. Specific breast and prostate cancers that are hormone-regulated and use the body hormones for development are often responsive to chemotherapy.