Biotech Data Preview: ASCO's Top Stories

May is the time of year when Wall Street's biotech investors are usually gearing up for the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The ASCO meeting, as it's known, is the Super Bowl of cancer drug research and takes place this year from May 29 to June 2 in Orlando, Fla.

Unfortunately, this year's ASCO conference is short on important clinical data, making the meeting something of a non-event for investors.

I don't expect to see the broad run-up in cancer-focused biotech stock prices that we've seen in years past. Instead, investors may focus only on the few biotech companies with important data to present at ASCO 2009.

ASCO will post research abstracts online for the 2009 meeting starting at 6 p.m. EDT on Thursday.

OSI Pharmaceuticals

OSI Pharmaceuticals(OSIP Quote) is likely to garner most of that attention. The company will be presenting data from two phase III studies looking at the use of its drug Tarceva as front-line maintenance therapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Maintenance therapy in NSCLC is an emerging idea that has not yet been broadly adopted by doctors. Essentially, maintenance therapy means treating NSCLC patients who respond to a first-line therapy (let's say with Genentech's Avastin plus chemotherapy) with a new drug like Tarceva immediately. The idea is that maintenance therapy may prolong a patient's survival by immediately knocking down residual cancer cells before they have time to regroup and start growing again.

Today, doctors typically wait for a patient's cancer to start growing again (cancer progression) before treating with a second-line drug.