Cancer Supportive Care > Overview
Cancer supportive care is a rapidly developing clinical and commercial opportunity, defined as the treatment of the signs and symptoms of cancer, or the treatment of the side effects associated with cancer therapy.
Oncologists are increasingly citing the critical importance of cancer supportive care in improving treatment outcomes and patients’ quality of life.
The best cancer supportive care products enable patients to receive optimal cancer treatment while at the same time benefiting from an improved quality of life.
The Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC www.mascc.org) attributes the significant advances in cancer treatment in the past two decades to improvements in cancer supportive care.
The market for cancer supportive care therapies is growing rapidly based on a number of key long-term factors:
• The increasing burden of cancer among an ageing population;
• The greater effectiveness of anti-cancer treatments, making cancer a “chronic” disease and increasing the focus on quality of life;
• Growing awareness of the benefits that supportive care therapies can deliver;
• Greater demands from both cancer patients and their carers for improved quality, as well as quantity, of life, and
• Introduction of novel targeted anti-cancer agents with specific side-effect profiles that provide new challenges to physicians and carers in terms of patient management.
The cancer supportive care market was calculated to be worth $13.8 billion in 2006. Within this market, there have been a number of extremely successful products marketed for various cancer supportive care conditions, including blockbusters in areas such as anaemia, neutropenia, nausea & vomiting, pain and infection. However, there are limited cancer supportive care product opportunities in development from analysis of R&D databases, and few companies with a primary focus on cancer supportive care.
Acacia Pharma is confident that with this significant opportunity it is well positioned to build a leading cancer supportive care pharmaceutical company developing high-value product opportunities with a high probability of success.