First there was Gleevec, the wonder cancer drug. Then came the sons of Gleevec. Now there is the grandson of Gleevec.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved another Gleevec-like drug for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia, or C.M.L., adding to a crowded field vying to treat this rare cancer of white blood cells.
The new drug, Iclusig from Ariad Pharmaceuticals, works in some patients not helped by Gleevec or some of its imitators.
“The approval of Iclusig is important because it provides a treatment option to patients with C.M.L. who are not responding to other drugs,” Dr. Richard Pazdur, director of the agency’s office of cancer drugs, said in a statement.
Iclusig, known generically as ponatinib, is the first product to reach the market for Ariad, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., that was founded in 1991.
A tablet taken once a day, Iclusig (pronounced eye-CLUE-sig) will have a wholesale price of about $115,000 a year, the latest cancer drug to pierce the $100,000-a-year level. Ariad said the price was about 15 percent higher than the drug’s competitors’.
While the approval was expected, it came three months before the federal agency’s deadline of March 27, and the drug’s label allows broader use of the drug than some analysts expected. However, the label also contains a boxed warning about the side effects of blood clots and liver toxicity, something analysts did not expect.
Ariad’s shares, which have roughly doubled in the last year, sank 21 percent to $18.93 on Friday.
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