Alas, Merck's possible contender to the weight loss drugs Acomplia and Alli has had to be dropped.
MK-0557, was designed to focus on a "hunger-stimulating factor," which has long been considered a potential target for anti-obesity therapy. And while the drug was well tolerated by the 832 obese people who finished the trial, they only lost an average of 7.5 pounds during the 12-month study, compared with people taking a placebo who lost an average of 4 pounds.
The report, the culmination of a 10-year study, was published in the October issue of Cell Metabolism.
"People did lose a statistically significant amount of weight, but not clinically meaningful," said lead researcher Dr. Steven B. Heymsfield, executive director of clinical sciences at Merck.
"The weight loss was about 3 pounds above the placebo group, but that has no commercial viability for a drug company."
Sauce, sorry, source.
2 comments:
Last year Merck dropped an obesity drug project that had going with a company called Nastech. They were foolish to even strike up the deal with Nastech. They cut their losses at 5 million. Now how much of this goes into the calculations for the cost of developing a drug? The costs are past onto the consumers so we should take more interest in all of these failures. Surely having millions of dollars and science in your corner should produce a better track record.
Anon -
The $800 million figure I've heard is supposed to include the risk of the drug not getting approved for any reason (from the Approvable letter for Muraglitizar which was subsequently dropped -- after the FDA reviewed it! -- to drugs that don't even make it to clinical trials), but it also includes "opportunity cost." So these costs get included, but there is so much fuzzy math that who knows how much it costs to develop a drug.
Post a Comment