Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, an oncology company focused on biomarker-defined cancers, announced that it is abandoning its experimental drug, MM-310, after an early-stage trial involving patients with solid tumors showed that treatment with the drug was cumulatively toxic to patients.
Based on emerging data since the recent amendment of the clinical protocol, the drugmaker has concluded that the study would not be able to reach an optimal therapeutic index for MM-310.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based drugmaker plans to initiate a workforce reduction as it closes out clinical activities, reflective of its narrowed preclinical pipeline and in line with prior cost-cutting measures.
Last year, Merrimack abandoned the other two experimental treatments, MM-141 and MM-121, after failures in pancreatic and non-small cell lung cancer respectively, leading to a 60 percent workforce reduction.
Read the press release.