Vernalis PLC Stumbles As Novartis AG Abandons Work On AUY922
December 19, 2014
By Krystle Vermes, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
News broke today that Novartis has ceased all development work on AUY922, the intravenous Hsp90 inhibitor. Rights will now revert back to Vernalis PLC, the development stage pharmaceutical company that was working on the project with Novartis.
"This is disappointing news, but illustrates the risks involved in new chemical entity drug development and supports our strategic shift to lower risk later stage programs,” said Ian Garland, CEO of Vernalis. “This program had potential to add future value, if it had successfully progressed through development but was not a driver of near term value for Vernalis.”
The process to hand over program data will take place in early 2015. Vernalis will then decide on next steps pertaining to the drug candidate and how to proceed.
The Success of Additional Collaborations
Novartis is not the only company that Vernalis has worked with this year, and it has seen success in its partnership with Servier, a France-based independent pharmaceutical research company.
In June, Vernalis announced that they had achieved a milestone following the treatment of the first patient in a Servier sponsored phase 1 trial with drug candidate BCL-2. The selective inhibitor is the first candidate developed from the collaboration.
"We are delighted that this new BCL-2 inhibitor candidate has now entered Phase I trials and look forward to further success from our broad, strategic collaboration with Servier,” Garland said at the time of the announcement.
Proteins of BCL-2 our crucial regulators of apoptosis. Deregulations of the protein play a major role in the survival of tumor cells. Pro-survival proteins of the BCL-2 family have been recognized as therapeutic targets in oncology for more than 20 years. However, a lack of innovative chemistry and structural biology has held back development as of late.
"Our experience with Vernalis shows that small molecules tailored against specific targets can have very high therapeutic potential,” said Jean-Pierre Abastado, director of the Center of Therapeutic Innovation in Oncology at Servier. “This success was achieved through a comprehensive chemistry and biology research program with our teams identifying and characterizing this promising BCL-2 inhibitor. This new compound further extends Servier's portfolio beyond kinase inhibitors, HDAC inhibitors and immunotherapeutic products."
Over the past five years, Vernalis has collaborated with companies including Biogen Idec , Genentech , Lundbeck, Tris and Endo .