Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

ITMN-Roche partnership: Roche can terminate the partnership and then develop a competing PI without further obligations to ITMN (beyond already committed R&D funding). However, Roche cannot play both ends of the stick by retaining commercialization rights to ITMN-191 while pursuing development of an alternative PI.

Dan Welch could simply have said this on the 1Q08 CC exchange I posted in #msg-47616072, but he evidently preferred to be coy. Despite the redactions in the SEC filing (#msg-47619042), there’s enough non-redacted language to understand what the agreement says about competing compounds.

Why does all this matter? For the time being—i.e. as long as Roche is nominally still the licensee of ITMN-191—Roche cannot publicly talk about testing RG7128 in combination with another PI.