Hal Barron [File photo]

Hal Bar­ron's team at GSK scores a win with pos­i­tive Ze­ju­la PhI­II front­line study — now comes the hard part

Score one for Hal Bar­ron and the new R&D team steer­ing Glax­o­SmithK­line’s pipeline.

The phar­ma gi­ant re­port­ed this morn­ing that its re­cent­ly ac­quired PARP, Ze­ju­la (ni­ra­parib), hit the pri­ma­ry end­point on pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival in a front­line main­te­nance set­ting for women suf­fer­ing ovar­i­an can­cer — fol­low­ing chemo and re­gard­less of their BR­CA sta­tus.

GSK bet $5 bil­lion on the Tesaro buy­out pri­mar­i­ly to get this drug, draw­ing the shak­ing heads of bio­phar­ma. Why pay a big pre­mi­um for a drug like this when As­traZeneca was go­ing from strength to strength with Lyn­parza, ran the ar­gu­ment, hav­ing won a huge­ly im­por­tant ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval to jump out ahead — way ahead — of the rest of the PARP play­ers? Lyn­parza — now co-owned by a pow­er­house can­cer team at Mer­ck — won the first ap­proval in front­line main­te­nance in ovar­i­an can­cer.

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