Clavis Pharma ASA Stops Elacytarabine Development on Negative Ph3 Trial in AML

Clavis Pharma ASA (CLAVIS), a Norwegian biotech, is considering closing or selling itself to another company after its experimental leukemia treatment elacytarabine failed in a late-stage trial. Clavis has a short-list of Scandinavian private companies that may be interested in taking it over and will approach them over the next few weeks, Chief Executive Officer Olav Helleboe said on a conference call today. All development work on elacytarabine has been suspended, the Oslo-based company said in a statement yesterday. The study, which didn’t show a significant difference in survival rates between patients who received elacytarabine and those taking other treatments, follows similar results from a trial on a Clavis pancreatic cancer treatment in November. Both drugs were aimed at improving existing medicines by using Clavis’s own Lipid Vector Technology.