Bris­tol-My­ers reels back in an ear­ly-stage can­cer drug prospect in $60M Asia deal

Close to 5 years af­ter Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb farmed out the c-MET in­hibitor BMS-777607 to Sin­ga­pore-based Aslan, the Big Biotech has seen enough ear­ly-stage da­ta to war­rant buy­ing it back. Aslan is hand­ing the drug along with its Pa­cif­ic Rim rights for $10 mil­lion up­front and an­oth­er $50 mil­lion in mile­stones, plus roy­al­ties.

The orig­i­nal deal back in 2011 was billed as a risk-shar­ing op­tion: Aslan got de­vel­op­ment and re­gion­al com­mer­cial­iza­tion rights for a drug that Bris­tol-My­ers would con­tin­ue to own in the rest of the world. It took awhile, but lit­tle Aslan com­plet­ed a Phase I pro­gram, con­clud­ing that the drug had some re­al po­ten­tial as demon­strat­ed against plas­ma bio­mark­ers and adding RON as a tar­get. “In­hi­bi­tion of RON re­sult­ed in sup­pres­sion of plas­ma C-ter­mi­nal telopep­tide (CTX) lev­els, an es­tab­lished bio­mark­er of os­teo­clast ac­tiv­i­ty,” notes Aslan on its web site.

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.