Denovo Biopharma In-Licenses Late-Stage Alzheimer's Disease Asset from Lundbeck

Denovo Biopharma LLC, a pioneer in applying precision medicine to develop innovative therapies, today announced it has licensed global rights for idalopirdine from H. Lundbeck A/S, including all rights to develop, manufacture and commercialize idalopirdine for all indications. Lundbeck received options to re-acquire idalopirdine for predetermined undisclosed financial terms, with Denovo and Lundbeck sharing China rights in the event Lundbeck's options are exercised and Denovo retaining all global rights in the event Lundbeck's options are not exercised.  Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Idalopirdine (now DB109) is an oral antagonist of the serotonin (5-HT6) receptor, which is primarily expressed in the brain and is hypothesized to be involved in Alzheimer's Disease, schizophrenia, and other indications.  DB109 has been extensively evaluated in numerous clinical studies encompassing more than 2500 subjects.  Although Phase 3 trial results were negative, subsets of patients who showed signs of beneficial activity of DB109 were identified.  Despite the recent approval of aducanumab, Alzheimer's Disease remains one of the toughest diseases to conquer as countless drug have failed to demonstrate efficacy.   While precision medicine has proved to vital to the many breakthroughs in oncology drug development in the last decade, the lack of pharmacogenomic biomarkers could be one of the main reasons of these failures in Alzheimer's Disease. Denovo plans to use its unique biomarker platform to search for pharmacogenomic predictors of DB109's efficacy.

"Alzheimer's Disease remains an area of significant unmet need in neurological disease, and the rich idalopirdine data set that has been generated permits Denovo to fully leverage its experience in novel biomarker discovery to potentially identify patients for which idalopirdine may have benefit," said Michael F. Haller, Ph.D., Denovo's Chief Business Officer. "Denovo discovered the first known genetic biomarker for drug efficacy in a CNS disorder, for our DB104 asset in treatment-resistant depression, and we hope to have similar success for DB109."

"We are excited to collaborate with Denovo Biopharma and build upon the efforts of our employees, investigators, and patients who participated in our clinical trials to potentially develop a personalized medicine for Alzheimer's Disease," said Keld Flintholm Jørgensen, CBO at Lundbeck.

About Denovo Biopharma LLC

Denovo Biopharma is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that applies novel biomarker approaches to re-evaluate medicines that have failed in broad patient populations. The company seeks to discover genomic biomarkers correlated with patients' responses to drug candidates retrospectively. Denovo then designs and executes efficient clinical trials in targeted patient populations to optimize the probability of a successful trial. Denovo has completed enrollment of patients in the U.S. and China with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) in a Phase 3 clinical trial and has an ongoing Phase 3 trial in Glioblastoma (GBM) for its lead product candidate, DB102 (enzastaurin), which was in-licensed from Eli Lilly & Co. The company has seven additional late-stage programs targeting major unmet needs: DB103 (pomaglumetad methionil) for schizophrenia, DB104 (liafensine) for depression, DB105 (ORM-12741) for Alzheimer's Disease, DB106 (vosaroxin) for acute myeloid leukemia (AML), DB107 (Toca 511 and Toca FC) for recurrent high grade glioma, DB108 (endostatin) for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and DB109 (idalopirdine) for Alzheimer's Disease.