Cancer Study Deals Blow to Amgen

The Cancer Letter (subscription required) scooped everyone today with a report that Danish researchers halted an independent study last October after discovering that patients who took erythropoietin (EPO) during radiation treatments for head and neck cancer fared worse than those who didn't get EPO. Amgen has been encouraging oncologists to use its latest version of EPO, called Aranesp, as a way to boost energy and improve outcomes from chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

This is the second major blow for the biotech giant in recent months. Late last year, researchers found that raising of red blood cell counts to near normal levels using Amgen's flagship product, Epogen, resulted in higher mortality rates among dialysis patients.

Amgen claimed to have little knowledge about the study in its comments to Paul Goldberg, the Cancer Letter's editor, even though the results have been available over the Internet since last November. But immediately after the story broke today, Morgan Stanley put out an investors' alert that sent Amgen's stock price plunging. Late this afternoon, Amgen's chief executive Kevin Shearer scheduled an emergency conference call for investors and reporters to shore up investor support.

Amgen isn't the only company that may get hurt by this study. J&J's Otho-Biotech division is the dominant player in the oncology market with Procrit, which is essentially the same thing as Aranesp. According to the story, Michael Henke, a German oncologist who has been raising similar concerns about Roche's version of EPO (which is about to hit the U.S. market), believes that there are EPO receptors on all cancer tumors, and that may account for the higher mortality. According to this theory, high EPO dosing to raise "energy" levels may actually be protecting tumors from chemotherapy and radiation, and even may be helping them grow.

"If it is really a cytoprotective effect, which is going through EPO receptors, it must happen at lower hemoglobin levels as well," Henke said. "I think the time has come that people have to reconsider how to prescribe EPO to cancer patients."