Pfizer is also stopping its efforts in dermatology and gastroenterology, and moving into antibody drugs and vaccines.
It took 20 years for the first antibody drugs to make it from the bench to the pharmacy shelf.
Genetic differences in people's immune systems may also explain why some people respond much better to antibody drugs than others.
Similar results have been found with some other antibody drugs.
"We are very intrigued by this, " says Genentech biochemist Mark Sliwkowski, who cautions that the precise role of the immune system in the response to antibody drugs is unclear.
Even as some researchers puzzle over the mystery of rare responders, others are finding that the immune system may play a crucial role in how patients react to bestselling antibody drugs.
Rockefeller University researcher Jeffrey Ravetch has shown that antibody drugs like Herceptin no longer work well in lab mice when the portion of the antibody that flags the immune system is damaged--even through they still bind perfectly well to the tumor.
The dream of drug developers for years has been to invent new medicines in the manner of biotech hothouse Genentech, now part of Roche, which used cutting-edge biology to develop new kinds of protein and antibody drugs that could mount a high-tech assault on cancer.
Amgen has moved two other cancer drugs in final stage trials, including an antibody to insulin-like growth factor 1 that is being tested in pancreatic cancer.
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In the first study at Stanford University, a man who received his brother's kidney has gone for two years without drugs after his doctors tweaked his immune system with irradiation and antibody treatments.
So on his own he crafted a human version of the antibody, otelixizumab, and cofounded Tolerx in 2000 to commercialize it and other drugs.
Research into these biologic antibody-based approaches is at an earlier stage than the testing of antagonist drugs, but antibodies eventually might be able to block CGRP action regularly so that migraines don't ever begin.
Novartis' promising Muckle-Wells drug--its antibody against interleukin-1, which it first aimed at arthritis--was one of the first drugs to benefit from Fishman's new testing regimen.
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