Helping Create a New Treatment

I mentioned a few posts ago that a lot of what I write about, I get from Google Alerts. And the Follicular Lymphoma-related sites that I am alerted to can be anything from medical journals to business analysis to local news. Last week, I got another one of those local news articles that i thought was worth sharing.

The article is from a local news site called the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business in Washington state, and the article itself is called "Richland native has hand in development of new cancer drug."

It's a short piece about a woman named Jackie Tyler, who grew up in the area, went to school to study biomedical engineering (she was fascinated by Biology and Chemistry, but knew she didn't want to be a doctor or nurse). She went to graduate school, and then got a job with the company Genentech. After a couple of years, she was put on a team that was developing a new cancer treatment. After 7 years, that treatment was given FDA approval last December -- the bispecific Mosunetuzumab (also known as Lunsumio). 

Her job on the team is as a technical development principle scientist. She works with the molecules in a drug to figure out what should be added to it to make the drug stable as it travels from the manufacturing plant to the hospital or clinic, and from a shelf to the patient. 

A few things kind of struck me from the article.

First, she was on the team for 7 years. It takes at least that long to develop a treatment and get it through clinical trials to approval. It probably takes even longer -- I've heard it's about 10 years for most treatments. Mosunetuzumab maybe was a little faster because it received accelerated approval. 

Second, did you ever think about something shelf-stability in a treatment? I focus on effectiveness and safety, and I imagine scientists in lab coats working hard at it all, but I never really thought about a whole separate team working on making sure that the treatment doesn't "go bad" before it gets to a patient. That's a whole different level of safety and effectiveness -- whatever gets added needs to work, but also needs to be safe.

I think many of us who are cancer patients, or who deal with any kind of chronic health issue, probably have mixed feelings about the companies that make drugs of all kinds. Especially in the United States, where so many people have to pay their own bills for their health, or might be denied by an insurance company because a particular treatment costs more than they are willing to pay. Pharma companies make lots of money from their products, and making money is obviously their goal.

But the company isn't the same as the people who work for it. I've had the opportunity to speak to a whole bunch of people who work for pharma companies, from Vice Presidents on down to entry-level workers. And there are definitely some people whose job is to make sure that the company makes money, and that's their priority. But so many others got into their jobs for personal reasons -- a relative with cancer or another disease, and they decided to devote their own lives to improving others' lives.

It's nice to read a story like this one, and remember that there are dozens of people involved in a process that brings a treatment to us. I'm grateful to them.