AbbVie Inc has announced that the company's experimental drug, venetoclax, for a kind of leukemia that is associated with a gene mutation has passed the mid-stage trial, Reuters reports.
The company would now seek FDA approval of the medicine for marketing the product. Analysts have predicted that the experimental drug has stupendous sales potential. Brokerage Cowen and Co has predicted that the approved medicine could grab annual sales of $2 billion by the year 2020.
AbbVie is developing the drug venetoclax in collaboraton with Switzerland's Roche Holding AG. The drug works by blocking BCL-2, a protein that inhibits self-destruction of defective or cancerous cells in the body.
The company announced that it would disclose the data from the Phase II trial at an upcoming medical meeting. The company also plans to obtain marketing approval of the product for the U.S market before the end of 2015.
The drug was tested on patients suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who had relapsed or advanced cancer or who had not received treatment. Specifically, these patients had a condition of 17p gene deletion that is related to high mortality rate of two to three years after the diagnosis of cancer.
