FRANKFURT, March 20 (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis on Friday agreed to buy a breast cancer drug candidate \u200cfor up to $3 billion from U.S. biotech firm \u200cSynnovation Therapeutics, adding a targeted therapy to its pipeline of cancer drugs.<\/p>\n
The \u200bcompany will pay $2 billion upfront and up to $1 billion that is contingent on further development achievements as part of the deal.<\/p>\n
The experimental drug, SNV4818, belongs to a class of selective \u200cPI3K\u03b1 inhibitors, a new \u2060approach for the treatment of a type of breast cancer known as HR positive\/HER2 negative \u2060and potentially other solid tumours.<\/p>\n
The acquisition adds to a growing pipeline of targeted cancer therapies, including a radioligand therapy candidate, \u200bthat Novartis \u200bis already testing. SNV4818 \u200bis currently in early\u2011stage trials \u200cand has shown promising activity against tumors in lab studies, Novartis said.<\/p>\n
Synnovation’s drug targets only the mutated form of PI3K\u03b1, an enzyme that often malfunctions in breast and other forms of cancer, while sparing the normal version found \u200cin healthy cells. And it aims \u200bto avoid the side effects seen \u200bwith existing PI3K\u03b1-inhibiting \u200btherapies.<\/p>\n
“While mutated PI3K\u03b1 is a well\u2011established driver in \u200cHR+\/HER2\u2011 breast cancer, there remains \u200ba challenge in \u200bachieving effective pathway inhibition with a tolerable therapeutic profile,” said Shreeram Aradhye, the drugmaker’s chief medical officer.<\/p>\n
Novartis \u200bexpects the deal \u200cto close in the first half of this year.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and Bhanvi Satija \u200bin London, Editing by Himani Sarkar)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRANKFURT, March 20 (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis on Friday agreed to buy a breast cancer drug candidate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[207,2112,12822,7997,206,13889],"class_list":{"0":"post-35593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-novartis","8":"tag-breast-cancer","9":"tag-cancer","10":"tag-cancer-drugs","11":"tag-experimental-drug","12":"tag-novartis","13":"tag-targeted-therapy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116260849774440302","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}