Bad news is out this afternoon from Trubion Pharmaceuticals
Pfizer, which inherited its collaboration with Trubion last year through a megamerger with Wyeth
Fortunately, Trubion has a reasonably credible fallback plan to soften the blow of this bad news. The company developed its lead drug as an alternative to Genentech (a subsidiary of Roche) and Biogen Idec's
Rituxan, a monster hit product for lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis, generated more than $5.5 billion in worldwide sales in 2008, according to Signals magazine. So any drug that can take away even a small slice of market share could be a big seller.
"The goal of our collaboration with Trubion continues to be the development of best-in-class CD20 therapies, and we look forward to the results of the ongoing SBI-087 Phase 2 study," said Evan Loh, senior vice president of BioTherapeutics Research and Development at Pfizer, in a Trubion statement.
While Trubion is a public company, this news might only generate a smidge of interest. The company, with a market valuation of $74 million, closed today at $3.66 a share before the news release. Less than 2,000 shares changed hands today in regular trading, and there was no action after hours that I could find.