PETITION - Assess Bazedoxifene (BZA) in treating breast cancer

Rose12

Need two more signatures to make 300. I wonder how many signatures are required? I see alot of New Yorkers brought the numbers up! I am from New York also, thank you my fellow New Yorkers!!

slv58

You have my signature and support-I sent it to all my friends and family to sign as well.

Anne45

Just signed the petition!

cp418

slv58, Anne45 - THANK YOU!!!!  For a while the signatures were stucky below 250 and hopefully the word has spread now!!  Please feel free to forward the petition to your friends and we can keep it active. 

Rose12 - I was hoping to get at least 1000 by the end of the month but maybe high hopes......  I've seen other petitions get thousands of signatures but maybe it was their circulation network.  Our petition is really grassroots! 

LtotheK

I will repost it today on Facebook.  We are probably about, what, 6,000 strong here?  So 500 should be a realistic goal.  We are experiencing the classic internet issue--so many posts, not everyone sees it.  I wonder if the moderators could put it on the front page, a thought.

cp418

Yes - Moderators moved it to the 'Advocacy Forum' located at the very bottomof the list.  Unfortunately you can only access it by using the 'Chat Rooms - Jump to a Forum' menu.  There are so many forums that the scroll bar doesn't display it.  So I don't believe it is very visible to many posters who SCROLL down the forum list to view/select where they wish to read/post. 

LtotheK

I am totally pounding pavement.  Amazing how hard it is to get people to do something as simple as sign a petition, but I am being relentless!

mike3121

My wife is Stage 4 BC and NED for now. She's taking Arimidex. She has a new doc and he said not many go from stage 4 to NED (sooo thankful). Anyway, has anyone contacted the big cancer non profit, I'm not sure which one it is. Someone should get all the pertinent working links together and send them an email telling them about what's up with Pfizer. 200 to 300 signatures is nice but one of the big boys shinning a light on Pfizer might get a better reaction.

Mike W.

 

jcb51

Thank you very much for starting the petition.

besa

bump

cp418

How Breast Cancer Drugs Are Developed: The Bazedoxifene Story

http://community.breastcancer.org/blog/how-breast-cancer-drugs-are-developed-the-bazedoxifene-story/

cp418

We just passed 500 signatures!!  Hopefully our petition is continuing to spread!   

hopefour

YEAH...I am so excited and grateful!!!

cp418

Yeah!!  Lots of recent signatures from CANADA!!!!  Thank you!!!  Pfizer has a site there too!!

cp418

We are almost at 750 signatures!!!  

besa

We are over 850 signatures!  This is an important petition.

Kat-ski

Done

hopefour

A thank you to all who signed! And a special thank you to cp418 for all you have done!

cp418

Update - as of today we have exceeded 1000 signatures and continue to collect more each day.  Initially I was going to submit our petition this week but am now considering to hold off until the end of the month.  It will be submitted to Pfizer head of Oncology via email and a printed petition sent via certified/signed mail.  Anyone have any different view on this option?  I am hoping to collect more signatures then forward first of October - Breast Cancer Awareness month.

cp418

Update - I printed off 3 copies of our petition and forwarded via certified mail to:

Pfizer Corporate Office:

1) Customer Service and Product Inquiries 

2) Geno Germano, President and General Manager, Specialty Care and Oncology

3)Robert Abraham, Chief Scientific officer in the Oncology Research Unit in research and development

hopefour

Thank you and please keep us posted as to how it is received by Pfizer!

cp418

Received a Phone call this morning from a Pfizer Pharma rep.  Very polite - she explained to me that the FDA has not approved BZA and each country has different regulatory agencies for drug approval and access.  She kept stating to visit their website and the clinicaltrails.gov for patients who are interested in trials.  I kept trying to steer the conversation back to BZA to get compassionate access here in USA.  I emphasized there are thousands of patients here who are interested in access to this specific medication.  I told her there are numerous patients calling Pfizer and who have signed our petition.  As patients we do not want to be ignored. 

I simply could not get any information about the future of BZA in terms of what Pfizer was doing with this drug???  During our conversation I got the feeling it was so general that we could have been talking about ANY DRUG.  Frankly I felt like I was talking to a politician who just deflects you and never gives you an answer.  She spoke in very general terms and I actually wondered how much she knew about any research for BZA.  I did mention Duke University Medical School -- she did not comment - so was she even aware of it???  Either way paper copies of our petition have been sent to Pfizer as well.  This phone call was a response to my contacting their Customer Services Dept on their website.

liefie

cp418, I signed the petition too. Thanks for your efforts - too bad it is not received as well as we would have liked. All we can do, is to keep plugging away.

cp418

Our petition is still active collecting with daily signatures. Hopefully I will hear back from someone at Pfizer other than this Customer Service Dept. I figure if they are now aware of our petition and see ongoing activity - maybe they will not ignore us.

BaseballFan

cp418....You are amazing! Thank you for EVERYTHING you do for all of us!

mike3121

This post last been dormant for awhile. I had high hopes for it. Any news from Pfizer yet? My wife was dx'd Stage 4 BC from the start. A-C chemo really did the trick and she's NED for now. Her oncologists have told her the cancer will return and come back less easily treatable. Right now she's taking estrogen blockers. I came across this article and in some ways is related to BZA.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/cancer/

cp418

I had sent printed copies of our petition to several individuals at Pfizer - Oncology Research Dept in early October.  I had a 'generic" public service phone call from their Customer Service Dept telling me to check out clinical trials.gov site.  Any questions I had regarding BZA were deflected with generic responses - so they did their job giving me a call back and that was it.  Interesting how the day of the phone call was the same day Pfizer news announced release of new drug Duvaee(TM) which contains BZA as one of the ingredients.  http://www.pfizerpro.com/hcp/duavee

So Pfizer is still manufacturing BZA and I felt this was hopeful news.  So I kept the petition site active through the end of October (closed now) as we were still collecting signatures.  I printed out this final longer list of over 1500 signatures and again sent to Pfizer.  I'm hoping our persistance will cause them to hear us to pursue clinical trials in the future.

curveball

@mike3121, did you mean the story called "Hope Builds for Drug That Might Shut Down Variety of Cancers?"

AmyQ

Bummer, I missed the petition but will follow its progress and hopefully one day this will be considered one of those "standard of care" drugs.

cp418

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131107132827.htm

The most frequently mutated gene across all types of cancers is a gene called p53. Unfortunately it has been difficult to directly target this gene with drugs. Now a multi-institutional research team, led by Dr. Lewis Cantley and investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College, has identified a family of enzymes they say is crucial for the growth of cancers that have genetic aberrations in p53. Targeting these enzymes with novel agents might prevent the growth of p53 mutant cancers, thereby benefiting a broad spectrum of cancer patients, including those with breast, ovarian, lung, colorectal and brain tumors.