Roche ends efforts to develop heart drug

SWISS DRUGMAKER Roche has ended efforts to develop a heart disease drug which some industry analysts had estimated could have achieved $10 billion in annual sales, after poor results from a late-stage trial.

The trial’s independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board recommended stopping the trial due to a lack of meaningful efficacy for the drug, Dalcetrapib, when added to the existing standard of care in patients with stable coronary heart disease, Roche said yesterday.

Rivals Merck and Eli Lilly are developing similar drugs, part of a new class of treatments which have been promising to boost levels of “good” high-density cholesterol (HDL).

All of the drugs are designed to block the cholesterol ester transfer protein, or CETP, which is linked to heart disease.

Statins and a raft of blood pressure medicines have dramatically reduced the number of heart attacks and strokes suffered by the population at large. But heart disease remains the biggest killer in the world, creating an opening for more effective medicines.

Other analysts said the Dalcetrapib failure could put a dampener on the development of similar drugs by Roches rivals.

The drug, which Roche bought from Japan Tobacco was seen as approximately two year’s ahead of Merck’s Anacetrapib, also in a late-stage Phase III trial, which was far more effective in mid-stage trials.

The rival Merck drug boosted HDL levels by 138 per cent in a mid-stage trial, compared with an average increase of 31 per cent with Roches dalcetrapib.

It is likely that more than 70 per cent of the costs Roche earmarked for the drugs trial and related studies had already been spent, and there had been no recent successes from the research centre in Switzerland.

Roche shares were down 3.7 percent, trading at 159 francs at 1352 GMT and underperforming a 0.5 per cent decline in the European healthcare index.

“While we have always stated that Dalcetrapib is a high-risk project, we are disappointed by the fact that this drug didn’t provide benefit to the patients in our study,” Roche’s chief medical officer and head of global product development, Hal Barron, said yesterday. – (Reuters)