The res­ur­rec­tion of LUM001: Mike Grey gets his drug back from Shire — along with $120M to gam­ble on PhI­II tri­als

EX­CLU­SIVE: In drug de­vel­op­ment, fail­ure isn’t al­ways fa­tal. Just ask Mike Grey.

When Grey com­plet­ed his deal to sell Lu­me­na to Shire back in 2014 for $260 mil­lion-plus, Shire was left in full con­trol of the charge to what it hoped would be a near-term ap­proval for a drug de­signed to con­trol ex­cess bile acids and ex­treme itch­ing.

A year lat­er, though, the lead pro­gram for LUM001 was ap­par­ent­ly in tat­ters, with an ug­ly mid-stage fail­ure for rare cas­es of Alag­ille syn­drome (AL­GS) that ap­peared to wipe out the block­buster val­ue Shire CEO Flem­ming Orn­skov had once en­vi­sioned when he did the deal. Then 2 years ago there was an­oth­er crit­i­cal tri­al break­down for the drug, then known as SHP625, with no sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion from base­line in serum al­ka­line phos­phatase or oth­er liv­er pa­ra­me­ters in pa­tients with pri­ma­ry scle­ros­ing cholan­gi­tis (PSC).

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.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER