Roche and Maxygen terminate drug development programme

Roche and Maxygen have jointly agreed to terminate their development of Maxy-alpha, a compound also known as R7025.

Furthermore, the companies have opted to end the agreement through which Maxygen licensed the compound to Roche, with the company retaining the rights to its interferon varient product candidates.

This announcement follows an earlier statement from Maxygen in September reporting that Roche had voluntarily paused the development programme for R7025.

Roche had fully funded the development programme for the compound and no milestone payments were expected in this or next year.

Russell Howard, chief executive officer of Maxygen, said: “While we are disappointed, we recognised and had advised earlier that termination of the programme was one of the likely possibilities.”

He added that the company still had much potential in its product portfolio and anticipated an important year ahead for its Maxy-G34 and Maxy-VII programmes.

In September 2007, Roche opted to put the development programme for the hepatitis C and hepatitis B treatment on hold following disappointing phase I clinical trial results showing a reduction in pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic effects of the compound in patients receiving two doses of R7025.

At that time, Roche informed Maxygen that it would conduct additional studies to investigate these results.