December 2, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
PASADENA, Calif. – The end of November was a bloody one for Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals as the company terminated 30 percent of its workforce including the company’s Chief Scientific Officer David Lewis.
Lewis was among those terminated after the company announced it was discontinuing three clinical programs targeting treatments for liver disease. Lewis’ last day with the company will be Dec. 13, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It is unknown at this time if Arrowhead will appoint a new chief scientific officer. Vincent Anzalone, a vice president at Arrowhead, told Xconomy that the company has not fully evaluated the status of the role, but confirmed that chief operating officer Bruce Given will assume some of Lewis’ duties after his last day with the company.
Lewis has served with Arrowhead since 2011, joining the company as a vice president and site head at its Madison, Wisc. Research and development facility. He was promoted to chief scientific officer in 2013. Prior to working at Arrowhead he served as a vice president and site head with Roche in Madison for a period of about nine months, before Arrowhead acquired the RNAi research and property in 2011. Before that he was a program director in RNAi research at Mirus Bio Corporation from 2004 to 2011.
In addition to the layoffs of Lewis and the other Arrowhead employees, the company announced it was terminating the liver programs ARC-520, ARC-521, and ARC-ATT, all of which use the company’s EX1 delivery platform. In its Nov. 29 announcement, Arrowhead said part of the reasoning for shuttering the programs was due to the understanding there would be “substantial delays in all clinical programs that utilize EX1” following a clinical hold that was placed on the program due to the death of primate study subjects at the highest doses of EX1 in a nonclinical toxicology study. The company maintained the delivery program for the drugs was safe in humans, saying there had not been any problems in hundreds of patients, although the dosing was not as high as the primate study. Out of the hundreds of patients the drug was administered to, Arrowhead said there have only been three serious adverse events observed. Two were fevers which were treated and the patients resumed the treatment, the company said. The other incident was an instance of hepatic carcinoma in a patient with chronic HBV and cirrhosis, judged by the treating physician to be unrelated to the drug.
Also, the company said it was planning to shift focus to its subcutaneous (subQ) RNAi delivery platform and extra-hepatic pipeline, which includes programs in HBV, AAT, Factor 12 and HIF-2alpha.
One area the company is keeping a focus on is cardiovascular research Arrowhead is conducting with Amgen . The two companies struck a deal in September to develop and commercialize RNA interference (RNAi) therapies for cardiovascular disease. Arrowhead is developing its RNAi ARC-LPA program. The engineered molecules are designed to reduce elevated lipoprotein(a), which is a genetically validated, independent risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The Amgen deal could be worth up to $673 million for Arrowhead.
