Eli Lily's suspension of arthritis drug development expected to hit Glenmark's pipeline

24 October 2008

Glenmark and Eli Lily have suspended development of osteoarthritis molecule for which the Mumbai-based pharma firm had already received $45 million for development of the molecule GRC6211. The Glenmark deal with Eli Lily was potentially worth $350 million.

Vikas Dandekar of Pharmasianews.com feels the suspension is definitely a blow to Glenmark's pipeline. ''With GRC6211 there were a couple of other follow-on molecules that were out-licensed to Lily. We don't know about that particular possibility. But GRC6211 was seen as a big breakthrough in the pain management category. So, it is definitely a blow to Glenmark's pipeline."

CNBC-TV18 shares with domain-b the verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Dandekar on.

How bad could this be potentially for Glenmark?
A little bit of an indication had already come about two months back when there was a mail that had floated around in all the brokerages, which indicated that Eli Lily may call off this particular deal.

At that time, everyone was very surprised and Glenn Saldanha himself had said that it is all unfounded. Now it comes to the fore that the $245-300 million kind of deal is called off.

Out of the total value of the deal, $45 million was already paid. When contacted Lily's top licensing director about the particular possibility, she had said, "At this stage we don't want to comment about this."