GSK dumps a late-stage HIV drug; MIT offers support for tech start-ups; Ra Pharma closes flat after $92M IPO
GlaxoSmithKline didn’t just kill losmapimod on Wednesday. The pharma giant was also forced to dump a late-stage HIV drug acquired from Bristol-Myers late last year in a $1.46 billion deal. Here’s the explanation from CEO Andrew Witty, during the Q3 call: “We terminated 795. It’s really a tolerability issue. We didn’t feel it was good enough from that point of view. In fact, we have at least two more backups and they come from both Bristol-Myers and GSK labs actually. And I don’t think we are going to lose a lot of time. We obviously lose a bit of time here but not a lot of time. So I think we feel like the overall program is really still very much substantive as a number of opportunities in it and even at the time where we did the transaction with Bristol-Myers, while we didn’t know the tolerability profile of this lead asset, we were particularly intrigued by a couple of the backups. So even at the time of the transaction, we’ve been increasing our focus on the backups. As it turns out the leader from BMS wasn’t what we hoped it would be but the reality is I think the program remains very much intact. I don’t think the time liability is going to be very material and the backups come from both BMS and GSK which is good because that gives you a bit of diversity of chemistry and it gives us a bigger solution set to be able to come up with the right kind of product.”
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