April 8, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Merger plans between North Carolina-based Targacept, Inc. and Catalyst Biosciences, Inc. are up in the air following Pfizer Inc. ‘s. termination of a 2009 agreement to develop a treatment to treat hemophilia and surgical bleeding indications.
News of the termination sent Targacept’s stock plummeting more than 10 percent this week. The stock is trading at about $2.51 per share as of this morning.
In 2009 Pfizer’s subsidiary Wyeth LLC and San Francisco-based Catalyst, a privately held company, entered into an agreement to develop Catalyst’s recombinant human Factor VIIa variants, including lead drug candidate CB 813d, to treat patients suffering from hemophilia and surgical bleeding indications, Yahoo News reported this morning.
CB 813d, which has recently completed a successful Phase I clinical trial, is designed to substantially enhance clot-generating activity at the site of bleeding and therefore achieve clinical efficacy with fewer and lower doses than current therapy. The hemophilia market share is about $1.5 billion annually. Hemophilia patients, about 300,000 worldwide, suffer from potentially life-threatening spontaneous bleeding episodes and substantially prolonged bleeding times upon injury.
With the termination of the contract, Catalyst all research and licensing rights will be returned to Catalyst.
Catalyst and Targacept announced merger plans last month, based in part on the promise of the Pfizer deal. Targacept, which has seen a number of drug candidates fail in clinical trials, told the Triad Business Journal the company was exploring new avenues and was looking to focus its development efforts on drug candidates for hemophilia, age-related macular degeneration and inflammation. Merging with and operating under the catalyst name was the solution. In a press release announcing the merger, the company said the merger “combines Catalyst‘s protease therapeutics pipeline and the financial resources of both companies.”
Stephen Hill, chief executive officer of Targacept, said in a statement earlier this week that the company “is currently reviewing the implications of this event on the proposed merger. However, it is too early to know the implications of ending the Pfizer-Catalyst agreement.”
This is not the first time a termination agreement has negatively impacted Targacept. Last year United Kingdom-based AstraZeneca PLC terminated a research and development agreement with Targacept.
With the Catalyst deal up in the air and the loss of the AstraZeneca deal leaves Targacept with no drug candidate in its pipeline.
In 2010 Catalyst Biosciences, Inc. received a $4 million milestone payment from Pfizer under their collaboration agreement for the development of recombinant human Factor VIIa variants for the treatment of hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. In addition to the promise of CB 813d, Catalyst also has four additional drug candidates including: an improved Factor IX for hemophilia B, an engineered Factor Xa that has potential uses for both hemophilia and the control of bleeding in non-hemophilia patients and two proteases for the treatment of complement-mediated disorders.
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