Edmonton company making key part of potentially life-saving drug
Posted June 7, 2023 4:32 pm.
Last Updated June 10, 2023 9:37 am.
An Edmonton company has created a key part of a potentially life-saving drug. Gilead sciences, a pharmaceutics company, played a key role in the recent roll-out of Trodelvy, a first-in-class drug used in the treatment of triple negative metastatic breast cancer.
“This drug will change lives,” said MJ DeCoteau, ReThink Breast Cancer.
“What we’re making here is the small molecule portion, we’re making the Trodelvy drug linker. And then that’s being sent to another site to be combined with the antibody that helps this potent compound get to its desired target,” explained Greg Klak, General Manager and VP of Operations of Gilead Alberta.
Trodelvy is an antibody drug able to target specific cancer cells without affecting the rest of the body’s cells. There are two parts to this technology; the antibody that binds to cancer cells, and the part that kills the cell it binds to. Gilead has created the cancer-killing part of the drug.
“We’re very proud to be part of this. We’ve participated in a lot of Gilead’s programs over the years, helping to develop the chemistry, the analytical methods, to scale them up and produce large quantities. So for us to be involved and play a role in this, that will help people in Alberta, in Canada, and around the world is very special to us.”
While a crucial element of Trodelvy is made at Gilead in Edmonton, the drug itself could also prove crucial for those with triple negative metastatic breast cancer, and not just for those in Alberta, where the drug is currently approved, but for patients around the world.
“People who have triple negative breast cancer are often very sick patients, latter stages of the cancer, and so what this particular drug does is it increases overall survival rates, and gives people a lot better quality of life,” said Paul Hurley, Senior Director at Gilead.
Triple negative metastatic breast cancer makes up for approximately 15 per cent of all breast cancer diagnoses. It primarily affects women under the age of 40, and is often later-stage by the time it is diagnosed.
