Pro­to­cols: Mer­ck punts ALK al­ler­gy meds; Gene edit­ing gets mixed re­views by a wary pub­lic

Just a few months ago, Mer­ck capped a 9-year al­liance with Den­mark’s ALK on new al­ler­gy med­i­cines by not­ing that the FDA had ac­cept­ed its bi­o­log­ics ap­pli­ca­tion for a dust mite treat­ment, MK-8237. And that fol­lowed two ap­provals, in­clud­ing an OK for Grastek back in 2014. But now, af­ter post­ing dis­ap­point­ing sales from the al­liance’s new prod­ucts, the phar­ma gi­ant is sim­ply walk­ing away from the drugs they worked on to­geth­er. ALK said that Mer­ck has de­cid­ed to hand back all rights to its sub­lin­gual al­ler­gy im­munother­a­py tablets (SLIT-tablets) against grass, rag­weed and house dust mite. The change-up came af­ter Mer­ck — now heav­i­ly com­mit­ted to im­muno-on­col­o­gy — com­plet­ed a repri­or­i­ti­za­tion of re­sources. “The tim­ing of this move is un­ex­pect­ed. How­ev­er, we un­der­stand that MSD’s de­ci­sion was based on a pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of re­sources,” not­ed CEO Steen Ri­is­gaard. “Our be­lief that North Amer­i­ca rep­re­sents an im­por­tant op­por­tu­ni­ty for ALK’s SLIT-tablets is un­changed. The sales per­for­mance over the past two years has been be­low ex­pec­ta­tions. Our view is that suc­cess there is like­ly to fol­low the path seen in Eu­rope, where slow ear­ly adop­tion has now giv­en way to sus­tained growth.”

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.