Small Penn­syl­va­nia biotech lays off a fourth of its staff as it tries to nav­i­gate com­mer­cial land­scape

Penn­syl­va­nia biotech Treve­na put out word Thurs­day morn­ing that it slashed 25% of its full-time staff and ter­mi­nat­ed a sales force agree­ment with Sy­neos, on top of a da­ta read­out it tout­ed as pos­i­tive.

The biotech’s on­ly ap­proved prod­uct, mar­ket­ed as Olin­vyk, was OK’ed back in 2020 for mod­er­ate to se­vere acute pain. The opi­oid was orig­i­nal­ly spurned by the FDA back in 2018 af­ter ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta was mixed com­pared to mor­phine at key dos­es and the agency want­ed more safe­ty da­ta. Two years lat­er, it got ap­proved for use in a hos­pi­tal set­ting, al­so get­ting a black box warn­ing about ad­dic­tion, abuse, res­pi­ra­to­ry de­pres­sion and more.

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