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Three major U.S. drugmakers, Eli Lilly and Co., Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc., said Tuesday they have formed a not-for-profit
company in Asia to focus on cancer research and treatments.
Eli Lilly is based in Indianapolis, Merck is based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., and Pfizer is based in New York.
The companies said they formed the Asian Cancer Research Group to focus on the most commonly diagnosed cancers in Asia, including
lung and gastric cancers.
They did not say in a news release how much funding they were committing to the project.
Over the next two years, Lilly, Merck and Pfizer said they will create an extensive database that will be made available
to researchers.
"The goal of the Asian Cancer Research Group is to improve the knowledge of cancers prevalent in Asia and to accelerate
drug discovery efforts by freely sharing the resulting data with the scientific community," the companies said.
They said as many as 40 percent of patients with lung cancer in Asia demonstrate a mutation that is relatively rare in Western
patients, suggesting a different research approach is needed for developing treatments. Meanwhile, the companies said gastric
cancer is the second largest cause of cancer death in the world, killing more than 630,000 patients per year, more people
than all cancers combined in the United States.
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