January 30, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Global drug giant Pfizer Inc. has terminated its licensing agreement with much smaller biopharma Roche for its spinal muscular atrophy compounds without specifying a reason, putting the kibosh on a deal that could have been worth as much as $70 million.
Pfizer and Repligen had been working on developing experimental drug RG3039, which has shown promising the a rare inherited disease which appears in around eight out of every 100,000 live births and gives most patient’s only a two to three year lifespan.
The companies said Friday that the agreement will be terminated effective April 26. The collaboration was originally signed in late 2012 and gave Repligen $5 million upfront, with a possible $64 million more under the terms of the deal, not including royalties from any marketed compounds.
Under the terms of the deal, Repligen had to complete the first two cohorts of a Phase I trial of RG3039, after which Pfizer would manage development. Repligen had already received orphan-drug and fast-track designations for RG3039 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as European regulators.
Repligen said at the time that it was farming out the drug’s processing so that it could better focus its efforts on its bioprocessing units. Shareholders liked the deal, because it kept the lucrative therapeutics business running and partnered to a much larger, more experienced Big Pharma company to shepherd it through the development timeline.
“There’s a lot of interest in orphan drugs, so we think we’re well positioned to find a partner,” Repligen CEO Walter Herlihy told Xconomy in September 2011.
Repligen had already received its first $1 million milestone payment from Pfizer in September 2013, but with the deal ending, shareholders can’t count on that influx of capital returning anytime soon.
Since snapping up Novozyme in 2011, Repligen currently supplies over 95 percent of the world’s market for monoclonal antibody-based drug component for Protein A.
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