Precious Metals

[gfp927z]

>>> ImmunoGen axes 75% of staff to fund new clinical trial


By Allison DeAngelis

Boston Business Journal

Jun 28, 2019


https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/06/28/immunogen-axes-75-of-staff-to-fund-new-clinical.html?ana=yahoo&yptr=yahoo


Waltham drugmaker ImmunoGen Inc. is steering its remaining dollars toward its troubled ovarian cancer drug candidate, announcing this week that it plans to lay off 75 percent of its workforce and halt other work in order to fund a new late stage clinical trial.

ImmunoGen (Nasdaq: IMGN) has struggled to bring its first independently developed drug to market since being founded in 1981. Over the last several years, it has been pushing an antibody treatment through clinical trials that it had hoped would bind to targets on ovarian cancer cells and kill them.

But ImmunoGen disclosed in March that the drug, mirvetuximab, failed to show long-term survival benefits in a 366-person Phase 3 trial. It was, however, linked to longer rates of survival without the cancer growing in a subgroup of patients with high rates of a protein called folate receptor alpha.

After meeting with the FDA, the company has opted to continue testing the drug in that subgroup, it said in a press release this week. A handful of other biotech companies are testing drugs for the same subgroup of ovarian cancer patients, including Texas’ Marker Therapeutics Inc. and San Francisco-based Sutro Biopharma, the latter of which is also using antibody drug science similar to ImmunoGen's.

To fund the new trial, ImmunoGen is laying off 220 of its 296 employees. It is also halting development on its early-stage leukemia drug candidate, suspending all other research activities and subleasing its excess office and lab space.

“Reorganizing the business is critical to the company’s future,” CEO Mark Enyedy said in a statement.

This isn't the first time ImmunoGen has cut staff to fund drug testing. It was once among the top 10 largest biotech employers in the state, but laid off 65 employees in 2016 — a measure that Enyedy said was “required to effectively manage (the) clinical studies”.

ImmunoGen expects to end the second quarter of 2019 with $240 million in cash. By conducting the layoffs, it anticipates saving more than 50 percent on its expenses and extend its cash runway into the first half of 2022.

The company no longer has money coming in from sales of the drug Kadcyla, technology for which Roche licensed from ImmunoGen. The company sold its royalty rights in January for $65 million.

<<<