Af­ter a rocky decades-long jour­ney, Take­da’s CMV drug gets FDA OK

Af­ter a wild two-decade ride, the FDA has ap­proved Take­da’s an­tivi­ral marib­avir — now mar­ket­ed as Liv­tenci­ty — for cy­tomegalovirus, one of the most com­mon vi­ral in­fec­tions ex­pe­ri­enced by trans­plant pa­tients.

Take­da picked up marib­avir a cou­ple years ago in its $62 bil­lion Shire buy­out, at which point the drug had al­ready failed a Phase III tri­al and changed hands a few times. But on Tues­day, Take­da tout­ed a reg­u­la­to­ry win in pa­tients 12 years and old­er, mark­ing the sec­ond ap­proval this year for one of the com­pa­ny’s new mol­e­c­u­lar en­ti­ties.

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