Back in 2014, Roche spent $725 million upfront on Seragon Pharmaceuticals, but three years down the line, it has now canned work on its leading drug, ARN-810.
In its first-quarter results announced today, the Swiss major quietly announced that the next-gen SERD drug, RG6046, has been “removed from phase 2” in HER negative advanced breast cancer.
No other details were given, but the compound appears to have been removed from the company’s roster of pipeline meds.
Roche paid $725 million (with $1 billion in biobucks) for Seragon, a privately held biotech based in San Diego, California, three years ago.
Roche got access to Seragon’s entire portfolio of investigational next-generation oral selective estrogen receptor degraders (SERDs) for the potential treatment of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. ARN-810 had been leading that pack, and was in phase 1 when it was subsumed into Roche.
Other meds from its buyout are still lined up in its pipeline, however, including RG6047 (GDC-0927, or ARN-927).
By Ben Adams
Source: Fierce Biotech
A monkeypox outbreak is emerging in the U.S. and Europe, and at least one country is amping up countermeasure preparedness. Bavarian Nordic has secured a contract with an unnamed European country to supply its smallpox vaccine, called Imvanex in Europe, in response to the emergence of monkeypox cases, the Danish company said Thursday.
Moderna’s recent chief financial officer debacle—in which Jorge Gomez departed on his second day on the job—raised questions about the company’s hiring process given its rush to global biopharma prominence. The most obvious one: How was it possible for Gomez to be hired when he was under investigation by his previous employer, Dentsply Sirona of Charlotte, N.C.
Merck & Co. is plucking a cancer project from the branch of Chinese-based Kelun Pharmaceutical for up to $1.4 billion, but details from the New Jersey-based Big Pharma have been hard to come by. The deal, first disclosed Monday on the Shenzhen stock exchange, has Merck handing over $47 million in upfront cash in exchange for ex-China rights to a “macromolecular tumor project.”
