An ail­ing As­traZeneca kicks two drugs out of the pipeline and an ex-drug part­ner’s share price is blast­ed

Last Oc­to­ber Synair­gen saw its shares clob­bered by the news that its Big Phar­ma part­ner As­traZeneca had scrapped a mid-stage study of their in­haled in­ter­fer­on be­ta ther­a­py AZD9412. The drug was de­signed to pre­vent crises for asth­mat­ics dur­ing cold sea­son, but a low num­ber of ex­ac­er­ba­tions was mak­ing it im­pos­si­ble to see whether or not it was hit­ting the pri­ma­ry end­point.

To­day, As­traZeneca $AZN used its quar­ter­ly roundup — fo­cused pri­mar­i­ly on rapid­ly falling rev­enue — to silent­ly toss the drug, cit­ing “strate­gic” rea­sons. And it al­so threw out AZD3412, a myeloper­ox­i­dase in­hibitor in mid-stage test­ing for Parkin­son’s that Glob­al­Da­ta had held out as a sig­nif­i­cant hope in that field.

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