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Biotech / Medical : ArQule -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Czechsinthemail who wrote (287)	8/17/1998 9:15:00 AM
From: Dr. John M. de Castro	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 399

ARQL issues update - bad news. biz.yahoo.com Most of what is announced here has been known or rumored for a while. What is a complete surprise to me it the termination of the collaboration with Roche. This collaboration was reported as follows: "Roche Bioscience. In September 1996, the Company entered into a collaborative agreement with Roche Bioscience ("Roche Bioscience"), a division of Syntex (U.S.A.) Inc. and indirect subsidiary of Roche Holding Ltd., pursuant to which the Company will synthesize Directed Array sets from compounds provided to the Company by Roche Bioscience, developed by the Company internally and/or developed by the Company as a part of the collaboration (the "Roche Bioscience Agreement"). Absent early termination, Roche Bioscience will pay the Company approximately $12.1 million over three years. The parties may jointly agree to increase the number of Directed Array sets to be provided by the Company under the Roche Bioscience Agreement, which may result in increased payments to the Company. Roche Bioscience is also obligated to make additional payments upon the achievement of certain milestones and to pay royalties on sales of drugs that may result from the relationship. The Roche Bioscience Agreement expires in September 1999 and is terminable by Roche Bioscience on or after September 1998 on six months' advance notice. If such termination occurs on September 30, 1998, the Company will have received payments of approximately $8.4 million from Roche Bioscience through that date and no further payments, other than milestone payments and royalties, will be due to the Company." The worrisome part here is that ARQL was providing directed arrays to Roche. The cancellation implies that this process might not be working. The use of directed arrays for lead optimization is a core component of ARQL's technology. The implication here that it might have failed is worrisome. I hope that we can find out more about what the problem may have been. It is always possible that Roche's leads that they supplied to ARQL were poor to start with and that the target was just not viable for therapeutic effects. I hope that this latter scenario is the case. John de C