One hopes so. Consider that just nine months ago the big drugmaker spent roughly $600 million to buy NeuTec Pharma, a UK biotech whose main drug - a treatment for hospital superbugs - was recently bounced by European regulators.

That failure is raising anxiety that an $890m licensing deal reached last week between Novartis and Antisoma for an experimental cancer drug could meet the same fate. Novartis oncology chief David Epstein believes this one will be a billion-dollar baby one day. But as one analyst tells The Independent: “Hopefully, their due diligence will be better than it was last time around.”

When Novartis bought the 20-employee company last June, it made instant millionaires of NeuTec’s founders, husband and wife duo James Burnie and Ruth Matthews. “NeuTec sold out with extraordinarily good timing,” a banker whispers to the newspaper. “This has got to be very embarrassing for the guys (at Novarits) who licensed it.”

The decision by the CHMP, the committee that approves drugs on behalf of the European Medicines Agency, confirmed its initial November finding. But a Novartis spokesman insists the drugmaker knew what it was doing and says the application for European approval was filed originally by NeuTec, not Novartis, and that NeuTec’s limited resources were to blame.

“When we bought NeuTec, we saw the typical shortcuts that are taken by biotech companies. We knew that the chance for approval was below 50 per cent. We factored this in. The rejection was due primarily to manufacturing issues. We will go back and do more clinical trials, but do them in a way that major pharma can do it rather than a 20-person company.”

Hmm..Isn’t this the same drugmaker that unleashed Zelnorm, which was recenly withdrawn for causing irritable heart syndrome? If at first you don’t succeed……..

Further reading…
Reuters;
The Independent.

Hat Tip to Insider.
[tags]Antisoma, Novartis[/tags]