Merck and its partner, Lundbeck, say the clinical data doesn’t warrant further development of the gaboxadol sleeping pill and all trials are ending. The side effects included dizziness, headaches, hallucinations and vomiting. This is bad news for Merck, which just last December told Wall Street the sleeping pill was to be one of its shiniing new meds that would help turnaround the drugmaker as it digs out from Vioxx litigation.

Interestingly, this occurs just after the FDA issues warnings about all sleeping pills causing strange behavior, such as sleep walking, sleep driving, sleep eating and sleep sex, and other side effects. Could it be that the Merck pill yielded something similar? Were scientists suffering from sleep researching?

“The termination of our joint insomnia development program with Lundbeck is clearly disappointing,” says Peter Kim, Merck’s chief scientist, who will now likely lie awake at night in need of a sleeping pill. Still, he insists the drugmaker remains “committed to our neuroscience and sleep disorders research program, one of nine priority disease areas for research and product development.”

“When developing new and innovative medicines there are always risks of failure, particularly for broad-based therapeutics which often carry a higher threshold for demonstrating value to physicians, and ultimately to patients,” says senior vice president Anders Gersel Pedersen, head of development at Lundbeck. “It is clearly disappointing.”

Today’s statement;
October 2006 press release about FDA submission plans;
June 2006 Merck press release touting Phase II data.[tags]Gaboxadol, Lundbeck, Merck[/tags]