On Monday, two major pharmaceutical companies gave good news about one of their projects. Merck (NYSE: MRK) and AstraZeneca (NASDAQ: AZN) announced in separate press releases that their cancer drug Lynparza has received approval from Japan’s pharmaceutical regulator for the treatment of three types of the disease: prostate, ovary and pancreatic.
The country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has approved Lynparza as a maintenance treatment after administering first-line chemotherapy to patients with certain types of these cancers.
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“For patients in Japan diagnosed with each of these types of cancer, there are very few treatment options,” said Roy Baynes, head of global clinical development at Merck Research Laboratories.
“Approvals for treatments like Lynparza, the first PARP inhibitor to be approved for these specific types of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and metastatic pancreatic cancer in Japan, allow us to advance in this evolving era of personalized medicine and change the way these cancers are treated, “he added.
According to the two companies, this year about 11,000 women in Japan were diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Over the course of 2020, more than 5,000 died from it. Meanwhile, there were more than 100,000 new cases of prostate cancer in the country during the year and about 44,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer.
This is the latest green light for the drug from Merck and AstraZeneca, which obtained its first major approvals in 2014 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Union’s European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Both stocks closed higher with the news, although Merck’s 0.4% gain followed the 0.9% S&P 500 index. AstraZeneca’s shares increased 1.8% on the day.