Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca EVP, oncology R&D

Af­ter near­ly a decade of work, As­traZeneca ax­es WEE1 and culls Mod­er­na-part­nered drug

Nine years af­ter dol­ing out $50 mil­lion up­front to Mer­ck, it ap­pears As­traZeneca’s work in the WEE1 in­hibitor space is over.

The UK Big Phar­ma has end­ed two stud­ies of adavosert­ib, a Phase I tri­al in sol­id tu­mors in com­bo with PD-1 Imfinzi and a Phase II study test­ing the drug in pa­tients with ovar­i­an can­cer, sol­id tu­mors and uter­ine serous can­cer.

The com­pa­ny’s top on­col­o­gy R&D ex­ec­u­tive, Su­san Gal­braith, said WEE1 “re­mains an im­por­tant tar­get” but the com­pa­ny has gone in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion be­cause As­traZeneca wants a pipeline fo­cused on “prod­ucts that we think have a greater trans­for­ma­tive abil­i­ty for the treat­ment of pa­tients with can­cer.”

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