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Gaithersburg, Md., Drug Developer MedImmune Forms Venture With Medarex

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 November 2004, 21:00 CST

Nov. 24--MedImmune Inc. yesterday announced a drug development partnership with the Princeton, N.J.-based Medarex Inc., a deal aimed at giving the Gaithersburg company a foothold in developing treatments for autoimmune diseases such as lupus.

MedImmune, one of the few Maryland biotech companies with substantial product sales, will play the role of financier and take the lead in pushing successful drug candidates to market. The company derives the bulk of its sales from one product, its Synagis treatment for respiratory infection in infants, and is trying to reposition its money-losing FluMist. Success with the Medarex partnership would broaden its array of products against a range of life-threatening diseases that currently can be managed but not cured.

"We think the opportunity is actually quite large," said Dr. Ronald Wilder, vice president of clinical development for this part of MedImmune's business.

The deal calls for Rockville-based MedImmune to make an upfront payment of $15 million to Medarex, with the two companies collaborating to use the underlying technologies as the basis for new autoimmune disease drugs. The partners expect to file an investigational new drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration within 18 months, if not sooner, Wilder said. Lupus will be the initial focus, although Medarex's human-antibody technology has broad drug-development potential, he said.

MedImmune will be responsible for development of any drug candidates, though Medarex will have the option of joining as co-developer and sharing in U.S. profits. Otherwise it will collect milestone payments and royalties from any sales.

Medarex has partnerships with other firms: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. earlier this month said it would spend as much as $530 million in cash, royalties and other payments for the firm's experimental skin-cancer treatment.

While it's not a Bristol-Myers, Pfizer Corp. or Amgen Corp. -- all Medarex partners --MedImmune is one of a select group of younger U.S. biotechs with the financial resources to finance a drug-development deal of this type. For all of 2003, MedImmune had net sales of $1.05 billion, and net income of just over $183 million. Sales of Synagis last year reached nearly $850 million.

MedImmune and Medarex have been talking about the New Jersey firm's technology for several years, although the talks really took hold over the past few months, Medarex President and Chief Executive Donald L. Drakeman said in an interview.

"MedImmune was very taken with our technology," and saw the potential of using it as the basis for drugs to battle autoimmune diseases, Drakeman said.

Autoimmune diseases include a host of serious, chronic maladies -- including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and lupus, in which a person's immune system, which normally attacks invading viruses or bacteria, turns on the body itself.

MedImmune is choosing lupus as its first target because "It's a devastatingly serious disease," Dr. Wilder said, and potentially affects millions worldwide. It can cause inflammation throughout the body, including in the skin, connective tissue, and even in the kidneys and blood -- causing painful damage and death.

A drug based on Medarex's technology would essentially block one or both of two targeted points in the lupus-disease process, Drakeman said.

"It basically impedes the disease mechanism," he said.

A lupus drug based on the Medarex technology has the potential for being a hugely successful product with the same magnitude as treatments for multiple sclerosis, Wilder said.

And "The market for MS is a multi-billions" of dollars, he said.

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Source: The Baltimore Sun, Maryland

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