In ear­ly blow to Ken­ji Ya­sukawa's R&D re­vamp, Astel­las drops out of the TIG­IT race, cit­ing PhI fail­ure

Just af­ter As­traZeneca jumped in­to the TIG­IT race, Astel­las qui­et­ly dis­closed that it was leav­ing, drop­ping out of a hunt for an im­munother­a­py ap­proach that has shown tan­ta­liz­ing promise but re­mains large­ly un­proven.

Astel­las re­vealed in their sec­ond quar­ter earn­ings to­day that they’ve end­ed de­vel­op­ment of the an­ti-TIG­IT an­ti­body they ac­quired in their up to $400 mil­lion buy­out of Poten­za in 2018. The Japan­ese phar­ma had been test­ing it in com­bi­na­tion with Keytru­da in a 300-per­son Phase I study on pa­tients with ad­vanced sol­id tu­mors. A small­er study test­ing the an­ti­body alone was com­plet­ed, 2 years ahead of sched­ule, in Ju­ly.

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