As­traZeneca shuf­fles the deck, deals out a new hand for two trou­bled drugs

Sev­er­al months ago, an As­traZeneca spokesman in­sist­ed that the late-stage tralok­inum­ab may have been qui­et­ly dropped for id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis, but the IL-13 ther­a­py still had re­al po­ten­tial for asth­ma and atopic der­mati­tis (AD); even af­ter fail­ing a Phase IIb study last year.

To­day, the phar­ma gi­ant an­nounced that it has out­li­censed tralok­inum­ab’s glob­al AD rights to Leo Phar­ma for $115 mil­lion in cash and up to a bil­lion dol­lars in mile­stones. And as an ex­tra, the com­pa­ny is al­so trans­fer­ring Eu­ro­pean rights on the ques­tion­able bro­dalum­ab pro­gram over to Leo, get­ting that back from a deeply dys­func­tion­al Valeant Phar­ma.

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