Con­tro­ver­sy over a lethal can­cer drug de­vel­oped by Han­mi and Boehringer In­gel­heim con­tin­ues to bub­ble up in Ko­rea.

In re­cent days a mem­ber of the op­po­si­tion Min­joo par­ty — Rep. Jung Choun-sook — cir­cu­lat­ed a let­ter from Boehringer In­gel­heim dat­ing back to Au­gust 23rd stat­ing that they were halt­ing en­roll­ment and stud­ies of ol­mu­tinib at the rec­om­men­da­tion of the Da­ta Mon­i­tor­ing Com­mit­tee, ac­cord­ing to a re­port in the Ko­rea Her­ald. And he ac­cused the coun­try’s food and drug safe­ty min­istry of al­low­ing tri­als to con­tin­ue even af­ter the dan­gers be­came ap­par­ent.

That was more than a month be­fore Boehringer an­nounced that it was wash­ing its hands of their part­ner­ship with Han­mi — though the Ger­man com­pa­ny on­ly lat­er ac­knowl­edged that Ko­re­an of­fi­cials had cit­ed at least one death and two se­vere ad­verse events in stud­ies of the drug. An­oth­er re­port cit­ed by the op­po­si­tion said three pa­tients had died.

As Boehringer ear­li­er ac­knowl­edged to me, there were “two cas­es of tox­ic epi­der­mal necrol­y­sis, one of them fa­tal, and one case of Stevens-John­son-Syn­drome in which the pa­tient sub­se­quent­ly died due to dis­ease pro­gres­sion and pneu­mo­nia.”

The drug was ap­proved in Ko­rea on May 17 — an oc­ca­sion that Boehringer trum­pet­ed with con­sid­er­able fan­fare as it pro­mot­ed its own plans for a rapid de­vel­op­ment ef­fort — and is still on the mar­ket.

Boehringer’s an­nounce­ment that it was pulling out of the deal came on Sep­tem­ber 30. But Han­mi is un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion for de­lay­ing the news to ac­com­mo­date in­sid­er trad­ing. The Na­tion­al Pen­sion Ser­vice, which took a hit when Han­mi stock plunged af­ter the news hit, is threat­en­ing to take ac­tion if the ru­mors of in­sid­er trad­ing are con­firmed. Some re­ports from Ko­rea say that word of the set­back was spread by a mo­bile mes­sen­ger ser­vice ahead of the for­mal an­nounce­ment.

Rep. Kim Myung-yeon of the Saenuri Par­ty told the Ko­rea Times that six funds sold Han­mi shares from 9 am to 9:13 am. The news broke at 9:28 am on Sep­tem­ber 30.

At that point, the ink had bare­ly dried on a new pact that Genen­tech signed with Han­mi to part­ner on HM95573, a pan-RAF in­hibitor now in Phase I. The big Roche sub­sidiary struck their deal on Sep­tem­ber 28, pay­ing $80 mil­lion up­front to part­ner on the drug, the lat­est in a long line­up of mar­quee part­ners who have signed with Han­mi as the Ko­re­an com­pa­ny mount­ed a big ef­fort to de­vel­op brand­ed ther­a­pies. And a com­pa­ny spokesper­son at Genen­tech said that they’re stick­ing with the deal.

“Our de­ci­sion to col­lab­o­rate with Han­mi was based on a rig­or­ous re­view of the sci­en­tif­ic da­ta and our be­lief in the po­ten­tial of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al med­i­cine HM95573,” Genen­tech said in an email to me. “Genen­tech be­came aware of the re­cent news re­gard­ing the Han­mi/BI col­lab­o­ra­tion (ol­mu­tinib EGFR in­hibitor), as well as al­le­ga­tions of in­sid­er trad­ing when they were re­port­ed in the news in the past week. While the al­le­ga­tions against Han­mi are se­ri­ous, they have noth­ing to do with our agree­ment.”

Boehringer didn’t an­swer queries about the doc­u­ment con­cern­ing the Da­ta Mon­i­tor­ing Com­mit­tee or when it first be­came aware of the ad­verse events re­port­ed in the stud­ies. Nei­ther did Pasi A. Jänne, a promi­nent re­searcher at Dana-Far­ber who’s list­ed on clin­i­cal­tri­als.gov as one of the pri­ma­ry in­ves­ti­ga­tors on one of the stud­ies for ol­mu­tinib.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.