When a company or a financial analyst reports that a drug will be a block buster - it means one of two or three things - there are a helluva lot of people who need it (like an obesity drug), it is better than another drug that many people need (like lower side effects or more effective), or it is the ONLY treatment for a fatal disease.
The last is the case for Pfizer and its new NSCLC drug. I am referring to non small cell lung cancer. According to my own post - which I had to reread because my brain is getting full and leaking info - non small cell lung cancer, of which there are four categories, accounts for 80% of lung cancer cases. In actuality, not that many people get lung cancer each year - but 80% of those are NSCLC. The other 20% is SCLC - almost always due to smoking.
The ACS estimates 220,000 new cases of lung cancer for 2011. The type of cancer that Pfizer's drug treats (by shrinking tumors) is thought to be found in 1 to 7% of 80% of that number - get it?
According to an article in Bloomberg news, the drug, which is available immediately, could
"generate sales of $540 million by the end of 2015."To me this is a heads up - a kind of treatment that only a millionaire can afford.
To give you some perspective, because 220,000 does sound like a lot - there were close to 2 million cases of diabetes diagnosed in 2010 alone according to the HHS' National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).
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