On Monday, two major pharmaceutical companies delivered good news about one of their projects. Merck (NYSE: MRK) and AstraZeneca (NASDAQ: AZN) announced in separate press releases that their cancer drug Lynparza had been approved by the Japanese pharmaceutical regulator for the treatment of three types of diseases: prostate, ovary and pancreas.
The country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has approved Lynparza as a maintenance treatment after the administration of first-class chemotherapy in patients with certain cancers.
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“For patients in Japan who are diagnosed with all these types of cancer, there are very few treatment options,” said Roy Baynes, head of Merck Research Laboratories, head of global clinical development.
“Approvals for treatments such as Lynparza, the first PARP inhibitor approved for these specific types of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and metastatic pancreatic cancer in Japan, enable us to advance this evolving era of personalized medicine and change the way these cancers are treated,” he added.
According to the two companies, nearly 11,000 women in Japan were diagnosed with ovarian cancer this year. In 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 won the first major approvals in 2014 from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) of the European Union.
Both stocks closed higher on the news, although Merck’s 0.4% increase saw the 0.9% rise in the S&P 500 index. AstraZeneca shares rose 1.8% on the day.