A chink has ap­peared in the ar­mor of da­ta that Glax­o­SmithK­line R&D chief Hal Bar­ron has been build­ing for the PARP in­hibitor Ze­ju­la.

The phar­ma gi­ant’s Q2 up­date on Wednes­day in­cludes the note that re­searchers have end­ed their Phase II MOON­STONE study, one of a slate of tri­als that Bar­ron has cit­ed to “help es­tab­lish Ze­ju­la as the most com­pelling PARP in­hibitor for women with ovar­i­an can­cer.”

The study had been set up to test the drug plus dostar­limab — its new­ly ap­proved PD-1 play­er now sold as Jem­per­li — among women with plat­inum-re­sis­tant ovar­i­an can­cer with­out a known BR­CA mu­ta­tion. Their pre­planned analy­sis sug­gest­ed it wouldn’t “meet the high bar” set out in the sin­gle-arm study track­ing the over­all re­sponse rate.

That wasn’t the on­ly ef­fort to get the heave-ho to­day. Their ICOS ag­o­nist fe­ladil­imab failed the EN­TRÉE-Lung sub study 1 at the in­ter­im analy­sis. This lung can­cer flop is the third straight fail­ure for this drug in re­cent months, which has suf­fered from low ex­pec­ta­tions af­ter a key set­back at Jounce on ICOS. It failed the IN­DUCE-3 and IN­DUCE-4 tri­als for head and neck squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma.

GSK al­so not­ed that “de­vel­op­ment of phase II RSV pae­di­atric can­di­date vac­cine (vi­ral vec­tor) dis­con­tin­ued fol­low­ing as­sess­ment that tar­get ef­fi­ca­cy pro­file was un­like­ly to be met.”

Bar­ron was an en­thu­si­as­tic sup­port­er of the deal to ac­quire Tesaro and Ze­ju­la for $5.1 bil­lion in late 2018. He was bet­ting that an in­sight in­to the ge­net­ics of can­cer would make the drug a big­ger play­er than many on Wall Street gave it cred­it for. And he got dostar­limab, re­cent­ly ap­proved as the 7th PD-(L)1 to the US mar­ket, in the same deal, with some equal­ly mut­ed ex­pec­ta­tions giv­en its sched­uled late ar­rival.

Ze­ju­la sales were £98 mil­lion in the quar­ter, a ris­ing fig­ure, but one that is still con­sid­er­ably off the block­buster track that would have jazzed an­a­lysts.

Bar­ron’s track record at the helm of the R&D group has come un­der in­creased scruti­ny. Ge­of­frey Porges in par­tic­u­lar has fault­ed the com­pa­ny’s per­for­mance in drug de­vel­op­ment as shares re­main un­der pres­sure. And while he’s struck sev­er­al high-pro­file deals over the last few months, set­backs in on­col­o­gy have con­tin­ued to raise ques­tions about the R&D group’s abil­i­ty to line up new block­busters.

CEO Em­ma Walm­s­ley, mean­while, took an ag­gres­sive stance in to­day’s quar­ter­ly up­date, bull­ish­ly cit­ing a re­turn to more of a busi­ness-as-usu­al stance in key health­care mar­kets that buoyed earn­ings. There was al­so $358 mil­lion in ad­ju­vant sales pinned to Covid-19. But GSK’s large vac­cine group has large­ly sat out the Covid cri­sis, skip­ping any po­ten­tial wind­falls. And doubts about its long-run per­for­mance con­tin­ue to af­flict ex­pec­ta­tions as ac­tivists push for change.

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.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.