Eli Lil­ly silent­ly walks away from a trou­bled $690M al­liance af­ter BTK drug floun­ders in PhII

Eli Lil­ly has un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly swept away a mid-stage im­munol­o­gy pro­gram for their BTK in­hibitor LY3337641, shrug­ging off a $690 mil­lion pact for the im­munol­o­gy drug — in-li­censed from Ko­rea’s Han­mi 3 years ago.

Lil­ly not­ed the pass­ing in a foot­note on the ros­ter of drugs pulled from the pipeline in Q4. 

Ko­re­an news or­ga­ni­za­tions re­port­ed a few days ago that Han­mi dis­closed the move in a reg­u­la­to­ry fil­ing, not­ing that Eli Lil­ly had re­turned the drug af­ter con­clud­ing in­ter­im da­ta un­der­scored a lack of ef­fi­ca­cy in a hot­ly com­pet­i­tive field. The move comes a year af­ter re­searchers ac­knowl­edged that the drug had failed a Phase II for rheuma­toid arthri­tis, but re­searchers had con­sid­ered this drug had po­ten­tial in a va­ri­ety of dis­eases.

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