Reading news related to Multiple Myeloma, I happened to run across a headline declaring Celgene’s New Multiple Myeloma Drug Is Kicking Amgen’s Ass. “Wow!” I said to myself, “Pomalyst must be doing a great job bringing people into remission!” Of course I clicked over to read the article. Imagine my surprise to find out that the headline was touting overall sales; doctors were choosing Pomalyst over Kyprolis for their patients.
Reading on, it became a little more apparent why doctors worldwide were choosing Pomalyst over Kyprolis. Kyprolis is only currently available in the United States where Pomalyst is available in both the US and all of Europe. That would indeed skew the numbers. A bit more research on my part discovered that this “news” story originated as a Celgene press release. Even if you factor in the wide audience, Celgene’s drug is outselling Amgen’s by a small margin. But is this anything that Multiple Myeloma patients should care about?
Actually, no. The information is for stock market investors and speaks to stock performance, not medical efficacy. Both drugs are still somewhat experimental and cannot be used as first line treatment, they can only be used on those patients who have not responded to other treatment methodologies. Medically speaking, both show equal prowess as treatment mediums, in no way is “Pomalyst kicking Kyprolis’ ass.” Seems there are much better places to get information about Multiple Myeloma.
This last week was the occasion of the annual ASH meetup. The American Society of Hematologists got together and droned on about all things blood related. The Myeloma Beacon was, last I heard, ferreting out the MM related information. Check in with them to see what updates they managed to glean.
OncLive offers a pretty decent update on available therapies, using terms easy to understand. It’s about the best summary I’ve read lately being short, to the point, and not full of self-congratulatory tripe. I’m never too interested in reading how great a company thinks it’s products are, and even less thrilled to hear how great an expert someone is because they summarized a press release.
I really miss the days of Edward R. Murrow and even Walter Cronkite.
