Six days af­ter Genen­tech rolled out dis­ap­point­ing ear­ly-stage da­ta on its IDO1 drug GDC-0919 (navox­i­mod) in-li­censed from NewLink Ge­net­ics, the big Roche sub­sidiary is kick­ing it out of the pipeline.

NewLink $NLNK an­nounced that Genen­tech has hand­ed back all rights to the drug, though its dis­cov­ery part­ner­ship con­tin­ues. The can­cer drug spe­cial­ist is walk­ing away from a $1 bil­lion-plus deal that was inked with $150 mil­lion up­front.

NewLink’s shares cratered once again on the news, falling 31% by mid-morn­ing.

This is the lat­est in a se­ries of gut punch­es to NewLink, which was sent reel­ing last year and was forced to re­struc­ture in the wake of the fail­ure of its pan­cre­at­ic can­cer vac­cine. IDO, a hot tick­et in biotech now with In­cyte $IN­CY ev­i­dent­ly well in the lead, was sup­posed to be its path back.

The writ­ing, though, was on the wall when in­ves­ti­ga­tors re­port­ed that GDC-0919 de­liv­ered on­ly a 10% over­all re­sponse rate in all tu­mor types in a com­bi­na­tion study with Tecen­triq — a PD-L1 check­point that is al­so un­der a cloud since the big Phase III fail­ure in blad­der can­cer. Genen­tech is not known for pur­su­ing fu­tile work in can­cer.

NewLink was al­so forced to con­cede 6 days ago that its in-house IDO in­hibitor in­dox­i­mod failed a Phase II study for breast can­cer, mak­ing this a very bad, no good, aw­ful week for the biotech.

Charles Link Jr.

“We are ob­vi­ous­ly dis­ap­point­ed in this de­ci­sion,” said Charles J. Link, Jr., CEO of NewLink Ge­net­ics, in a state­ment. “We re­main com­mit­ted to ad­vanc­ing our IDO path­way in­hibitor in­dox­i­mod, which con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate ex­cit­ing da­ta in com­bi­na­tion with an­ti-PD-1 agents, can­cer vac­cines, and chemother­a­py in mul­ti­ple can­cer types in­clud­ing melanoma, prostate can­cer, acute myeloid leukemia, and pan­cre­at­ic can­cer.”

Investors, it seems, are willing to give Unum Therapeutics one last shot — or at least one last shot to a company of that name.

The ailing cancer biotech, beset by a series of clinical holds and multiple failed lead programs, announced today that they’ve acquired Kiq LLC and that investors are putting in $104 million to advance Kiq’s pipeline of kinase inhibitors. Unum shareholders will now own only 16.2% of the company and CEO Chuck Wilson indicated that the cell therapies the biotech has worked on since its founding may be on their way out, saying Unum will “explore strategic options” for those products.

Vor Biopharma is muscling up.

CEO Robert Ang, who was reluctant to divulge the headcount when discussing his move from Neon Therapeutics to Vor last August, readily offered that the team has grown from 6 to 50 in less than a year. The biotech is moving to a larger office on Cambridge Parkway Drive in weeks, giving it more space to complete the IND-enabling work and manufacturing scale-up — conducted by a CDMO partner — in preparation for clinical trials planned for the first half of 2021.

By the time the FDA finally granted an accelerated OK for Immunomedics’ Trodelvy, we already got a very strong hint that their confirmatory Phase III study in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer was a success.

That’s because the independent data safety monitoring committee recommended that the trial be stopped early. But just what pointed them to the conclusion was still unclear.

“We do not know the totality of their decision other than it’s pretty evident that the primary endpoint was met; otherwise they could not request to halt the study,” Behzad Aghazadeh, the executive chairman, told Endpoints News at the time.

Following a successful Phase III study in April showcasing the safety and potential of its new sleep drug, Idorsia posted some mixed news in the second Phase III study, but that won’t stop a planned filing aimed at regulatory approval.

The drug, a dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) called daridorexant, was found to significantly improve sleep maintenance and subjective total sleep time in 25 mg doses, replicating results from the first Phase III study. However, improvements in sleep onset and daytime functioning narrowly missed statistical significance, despite numerical consistency with the April study.