AbbVie is ditching work on all the alpha V beta 6 (αvβ6) inhibitors that it paid $20 million to license from Morphic Therapeutic in 2020. The Big Pharma is culling the work because of a suspected on-target “safety signal” from preclinical testing.
Morphic revealed the news in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Thursday morning. AbbVie paid Morphic $100 million upfront in 2018 and then doled out $20 million in 2020 to license MORF-720 and MORF-627, programs that inhibit the αvβ6 integrin. Those assets do not show up on Morphic’s pipeline.
Morphic had intended the drugs for fibrotic diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF, a rare and fatal lung scarring disease. The disease has only two approved drugs, Boehringer Ingelheim’s Ofex and Genentech’s Esbriet, both greenlighted in 2014.
The pair will continue work on other research activities for other integrin targets, Morphic said in its full-year 2021 financial results Thursday morning. More details on the preclinical observations will be disclosed in a scientific publication, the biotech said.
AbbVie didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time safety concerns have scarred an αvβ6 inhibitor in IPF. Biogen axed a phase 2 study of BG00011, a monoclonal antibody, in September 2019 because of safety concerns.
While the safety concerns could be a “potential challenge” for the αvβ6 class of agents, it shouldn’t hamper the work of Pliant Therapeutics in IPF, RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note. The biotech’s oral small molecule PLN-74809 “remains clean” because it inhibits both αvβ6 and αvβ1, which potentially indicates the combo and target profile “may make it more likely to thread a therapeutic window and show activity at safe doses,” the analysts stated.
Pliant’s phase 2a data showed that across all four dosing levels in the study, patients achieved more than 50% target engagement, Pliant said in September 2021. The biotech awaits longer-term data to see if the drug actually works to correct IPF, though.
Others in the IPF field include Endeavor Biomedicines, which snagged $101 million earlier this month to bankroll its international phase 2 study of taladegib, or ENV-101. The trial is set to read out within 18 months, CEO John Hood, Ph.D., told Fierce Biotech at the time of the financing.
Also in its full-year 2021 update, Morphic said the company has $408 million in cash, which is enough to get it through the end of 2024.