As lead drug runs in­to a wall, De­ci­phera slims down its pipeline, puts 140 jobs on the chop­ping block

Bare­ly a month af­ter dis­ap­point­ing da­ta shat­tered hopes for a ma­jor la­bel ex­pan­sion for the GI tu­mor drug Qin­lock, De­ci­phera is mak­ing a ma­jor piv­ot — scrap­ping de­vel­op­ment plans for that drug and dis­card­ing an­oth­er while it hun­kers down and fo­cus­es on two re­main­ing drugs in the pipeline.

As a re­sult, 140 of its staffers will be laid off.

The re­struc­tur­ing, which claims the equiv­a­lent of 35% of its to­tal work­force, will take place across all de­part­ments in­clud­ing com­mer­cial, R&D as well as gen­er­al and ad­min­is­tra­tive sup­port func­tions, De­ci­phera said, as it looks to stream­line Qin­lock-re­lat­ed com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions in the US while con­cen­trat­ing on­ly on a “se­lect num­ber of key Eu­ro­pean mar­kets.”

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