One of the goals we strive toward every day is to find a cure for cancer. The American Cancer Society has estimated that more than half a million Americans died of cancer and more than 1.4 million Americans were diagnosed with new cancers in 2009. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States, exceeded only by heart disease.
Our cancer therapies are breakthroughs that change the standard of care and help patients with cancer live longer lives. We are making real headway towards the goal of shifting cancer from a death sentence to a chronic disease that can be managed and controlled — or defeated entirely.
We are focused on finding truly innovative scientific pathways and targets (e.g. our discovery of VEGF, HER2). In the past 13 years, we have launched four novel drugs that have proven to extend survival in various forms of cancer, and we are committed to continuing to develop better therapies for cancer patients.
The pricing of our therapies reflects the difficulties of trying to find cures for cancer. Our approach to drug development is expensive, risky and time-consuming. Most of our projects fail. It took approximately 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in Herceptin® (Trastuzumab) before we generated data demonstrating that use in early-stage patients cut breast cancer recurrence by half. When trying to cure cancer, progress can take many years and is filled with false starts and dead-ends.
The investments we make to develop novel medicines are only viable if there is a reasonable return and if our business is sustainable. Our cancer medicines are generally priced competitively with other recently launched cancer products.
It is our hope that drugs like Genentech's Herceptin, Avastin® (bevacizumab), Rituxan® (Rituximab), and Tarceva® (erlotinib) are the first wave of an evolution towards safer and more effective therapies. We continue to invest billions of dollars to develop breakthrough therapies that have the potential to be revolutionary steps forward in cancer treatment. We believe that the investments we are making today will make cancer a disease we can one day all survive.
