April, 2024
Four ovarian cancer patients were invited to Tsukuba Research Laboratories to have round-table-talk in December 2023. Total 52 employees, mainly R&D researchers, attended the discussion on the day.
This round-table-talk titled “Let‘s Learn More about Cancer Patients“ is held as a part of hhc activity. The activity aiming to “realize cancer treatment without suffering from side-effects” marked sixth year in 2023 since its incarnation in 2017.
The activity was started by the non-clinical safety team which engages in research on side effects of medicines on daily basis. Initially, I found patients’ anxieties over side-effects and related symptoms and came across the idea to start this activity that if we could raise solutions to patients’ anxieties with approaches applying our safety studies, while I work on how to control side-effects of anti-cancer medicines and maximize their efficacy.
Besides the latest table talk with ovarian cancer patients, we have had chances to directly talk with breast cancer and hepatic cancer patients, as well as opportunities to conduct interviews and surveys on patients under various situations in the past 6 years since the initiation. The activity shed light on challenges, such as “Patients suffer from prolonged side-effects, including numbness or hair loss, rather than just serious and lethal side effects, including cardiac side-effects and interstitial pneumonia”, “there are no index available to visualize side-effects, such as numbness or malaise”, and “issues over accessibility of correct information about side-effects and provision of easy to understanding information for healthcare workers/patients”. As safety researchers, we were likely to focus on lethal side-effects. Through this activity, we, however, rather deepen our understanding on daily anxieties of patients as I found they also exist in somewhere else.
Among those anxieties, as we shared an issue of “having no visualizing index on side effects” with internal drug discovery researchers and a team in charge of communication with medical institutions, a collaborative activity was immediately started with a common sense of purpose that we have challenges to address. In terms of numbness (peripheral neuropathy), we shared the information about anxieties held among healthcare workers by conducting interviews with doctors, rather than just collecting information on patients. With finding doctors’ conflicting concerns over maintaining use of medicines causing side-effects of numbness or hair loss on patients in terminal phases, we raised a common goal to develop anticancer medicines without side-effects in order to sort out anxieties of patients and healthcare workers. Currently, members in Eisai’s R&D team are working all together to create anticancer medicines without side-effects, for instance, we conduct parallel development programs on biomarkers and screening methods for side-effects.
“Eisai’s uniqueness is that patients’ anxiety can be a starting point of a collaborative work in which relevant segments exercise wisdom. When an activity started as a hhc activity is incorporated in actual R&D operations, the activity is, in some extent, “finished” as a hhc activity. We would like to find other anxieties through socialization with patients, and challenge to work out the issue" Seki, who started this activity, explained.
Eisai will apply what we perceived from anxieties of cancer patients through hhc socializing activities to our future drug discovery operations, seeking to deliver prevention/cure of cancer and cancer treatments without side-effects.
