A wait of at least a year for the women’s drug

A new adjuvant drug. This is the first important news that comes from the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the annual meeting that has always been a milestone in the path of global oncology. It’s called Ribociclib and if administered together with hormonal therapy to women operated on for breast cancer, it increases the possibility of healing or in any case surviving for a long time. We talked about it in the interview below with Michelino De Laurentiis. Who at the end of our conversation wondered how long the Italian patients will have to wait to have it available.

Since Novartis produces the drug, we forwarded the question to Valentino Confalone, managing director of Novartis Italia, present in Chicago precisely because of the importance of this study.

Doctor Confalone, when is the drug expected to arrive in Italy?

We expect to submit data from the Phase III study to European regulatory authorities later this year. After the European approval we will proceed immediately with the request for reimbursement in Italy and we hope a speedy approval process given the positive data of the study presented. These findings represent an important milestone in our ambition to improve patient outcomes with early-stage breast cancer.

This is important news, what else should we expect?

We are committed to developing innovative therapeutic approaches in particular in the three big killers: breast, prostate and lung cancer, which represent some of the main health emergencies in our country. Our approach is part of the in-depth knowledge of the pathology and of which are the key drivers to be hit with the aim of making metastatic disease chronic and increase the promise of recovery of patients in the early stage of the disease.

Looking to the near future, by the first part of next year we hope to make an important treatment for prostate cancer available in Italy. It is a therapeutic approach developed in Italy, in our sites in Piedmont, which uses the technological platform of radioligands, a new therapeutic approach based on precision medicine capable of changing the paradigm of oncological treatment, a bit like what happened with the discovery of immunotherapy. We have ongoing clinical studies in various oncotypes that investigate the efficacy and safety of this technology and we hope to have the first results as soon as possible.