Why hasn’t anyone seen it before?
A question that is frequently asked. Millions of cancer patients around the globe have been treated with EGFR-inhibitors during the past 20 years.
So why hasn’t anyone reported this before?
Perfect alignment: A series of circumstances, vigilance, clinical acumen, and serendipity.
The COIN and NORDIC VII trials (which together included over 2000 patients with colorectal cancer) reported significant reduction in peripheral neuropathy among the patients treated with an EGFR-inhibitor.
Actually, physicians from at least 10 different hospitals have reported the same observations.
Academic drug trials using available EGFR-inhibitors are deterred by high drug prices while the market license holders of these drugs may be concerned that their cancer markets could be cannibalized by cheaper pain drugs.
Neither academic medicine nor big pharma will therefore forward this innovation in its current state. For this reason, the AKIGAI founders established a biotech start-up to bring the pre-clinical and clinical findings from bench and bedside, back to patients suffering from neuropathic pain.
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