No­var­tis' $111M bet on IL-17C drug turns sour — but Mor­phoSys, Gala­pa­gos will ex­plore op­tions

Just a year af­ter No­var­tis bought its way in­to Mor­phoSys’ and Gala­pa­gos’ de­vel­op­ment pact for MOR106, the part­ners are writ­ing off the atopic der­mati­tis treat­ment and ex­tin­guish­ing hopes for $1 bil­lion in mile­stones.

MOR106 did not pass an in­ter­im analy­sis for fu­til­i­ty dur­ing the Phase II IGUA­NA tri­al, the two Eu­ro­pean biotechs (Mor­phoSys in Mu­nich and Gala­pa­gos in Meche­len, Bel­gium) dis­closed. No­var­tis was ap­par­ent­ly al­so in­volved in the de­ci­sion af­ter it was de­ter­mined that the study had a low prob­a­bil­i­ty of meet­ing the pri­ma­ry end­point on the eczema area and sever­i­ty in­dex, or EASI, score.

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