Amgen Inc. will work to widen use of its newest medicine, denosumab, approved last year to treat osteoporosis and delay fractures from cancer, while developing three oncology drugs, its chief executive officer said.

Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology company, will report later this month revenue growth for 2010, Chairman and CEO Kevin Sharer said at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. In 2009, sales declined 2.3 percent to $14.4 billion as revenue from anemia medications fell. Since 2004, the company has relied on the same five drugs for about 90 percent of revenue.

"After working for 15 years, investing a billion and a half dollars and overcoming many challenges, we brought to market two very important medicines that we are very optimistic about," Sharer said, referring to the two forms of denosumab the company is now marketing. Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), had $22.9 billion in current assets on Sept. 30. Sharer said he will invest the company's cash in advancing new drugs and also consider "intelligent" acquisitions with a priority on early-stage medicines because they represent the greatest value.

"Acquisition is a scary term and it ought to be a scary term," Sharer said. "If you wake up thinking you have to make an acquisition, it's like waking up and thinking you have to get married."

Denosumab is approved under the name Prolia for use by older women with osteoporosis and as Xgeva for delaying bone fractures in cancer patients. It will remain Amgen's largest program for now, while the company begins late-stage testing on three experimental cancer drugs, Sean Harper, Amgen's chief medical officer, said Tuesday.

Motesanib, the most advanced of the three drugs, may have study results released later this year, Harper said. Motesanib is being developed with Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. The company will also continue to research and develop drugs for immunology, cardiovascular disease and other indications and shouldn't be thought of as a cancer-treatment company, Harper said. "There's no way we could grow Amgen just based on oncology," Harper said. "I feel very good about the fact that we haven't built an oncology-focused pipeline, it's a healthy proportion of our pipeline."

Denosumab may generate $2.4 billion in annual sales within five years to reduce bone fractures in cancer patients, said Yaron Werber, a Citigroup Inc. analyst. If the drug can win U.S. clearance to prevent breast and prostate cancer from moving into bone, it may add $2 billion in sales a year for each use, said Eric Schmidt, a Cowen & Co. analyst.