Antisoma abandons work on advanced lung cancer drug

Antisoma, the biotech minnow that has in effect become a research arm of the Swiss drugs giant Roche, has abandoned work on one of its four advanced drugs.

Antisoma shares fell 6 per cent to 38p after the company said a potential new treatment for lung cancer had been found to be unsafe for human use.

The product - codenamed AS1403, or TheraFab - combines a fragment of an antibody, the disease-fighting part of the human immune system, with a radioactive particle. The drug left patients with a potentially dangerous level of radioactivity in the kidneys, according to trial data published yesterday.

TheraFab was one of the drugs that Roche has an option to take on for the later stages of development, under Antisoma's ground-breaking partnership deal last year.

Glyn Edwards, the chief executive of Antisoma, said: "We have many promising drug candidates in our pipeline and can therefore move quickly to discontinue programmes when trial results show that resources would be more usefully allocated elsewhere."

Mr Edwards rushed to assure investors that the failure of TheraFab should not be read as bad news for the company's lead product, the much-delayed ovarian cancer treatment Pemtumomab, which is based on the same antibody. Kidney problems are a well-known side effect of drugs based on antibody fragments, but the same effect is not seen with whole antibodies such as Pemtumomab.