Lilly gives up on $40M BCL-2 buy as part of latest pipeline cull
01 Nov 2022
Antibody
Preview
Source: FierceBiotech
The further advanced of Eli Lilly’s two scrapped assets is LY3451838, which was undergoing a phase 2 trial for treatment-resistant migraine.
While Eli Lilly celebrated a “solid quarter” of earnings this morning, a look over the Big Pharma’s third-quarter presentation reveals that the company has quietly dumped two clinical-stage assets.
One of these is LOXO-338, which was undergoing a phase 1 trial in patients with advanced hematologic malignancies. Lilly licensed the ex-China rights to the drug—a selective small-molecule inhibitor of a protein called B-cell lymphoma-2—from Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical two years ago.
At the time of the deal, Fosun hyped up BCL-2 as an “increasingly important therapeutic target in cancer biology.” Lilly presumably agreed, handing over $40 million and pledging up to $400 million to follow in potential biobucks. AbbVie and Roche have previously scored success by bringing the first BCL-2 inhibitor to market in the form of leukemia drug Venclexta.
Fosun has its own phase 1 trial of LOXO-338, which it calls FCN-338, underway in China for chronic lymphocytic leukemia and small lymphocytic lymphoma.
The further advanced of Lilly’s two scrapped assets is LY3451838, which was undergoing a phase 2 trial for treatment-resistant migraine. The monoclonal antibody, which is administered intravenously, is designed to target the pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide-38 receptor.
The midstage study kicked off in November 2020 and was due to complete at the end of September 2022, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. It’s not clear whether a peek at the data spooked Lilly into dropping the drug.
Lilly had not responded to Fierce Biotech’s request for more information on the discontinuations at time of publication.
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