West Coast Editor

To boost cash and work more intently on its cancer compounds - including one that has completed Phase III trials - IDM Pharma Inc. is offloading assets related to its infectious disease programs and others to Pharmexa A/S for $12 million.

The deal, expected to close by the end of the year, will reduce IDM's cash burn by $3 million annually, since Pharmexa, of Hørsholm, Denmark, is taking over the San Diego lease and getting 27 IDM employees, which leaves about 110 workers at the company's Irvine, Calif., and Paris facilities, said Emile Loria, president and chief business officer for IDM.

In August, IDM (known as Immuno-Designed Molecules SA), based in Paris, completed its all-stock merger with San Diego-based Epimmune Inc., gaining the latter's epitope target identification capabilities. (See BioWorld Today, March 17, 2005.)

"This is the important asset that IDM keeps," said Loria, adding that the transaction with Pharmexa leaves IDM with about two years' worth of operating capital.

Under the terms of the sale, the two firms will enter into two separate, fully paid-up perpetual license agreements that guarantee IDM continuing rights to use the PADRE and Epitope Identification System technologies for ongoing cancer work.

Also, the companies are entering a three-year services agreement, which assures IDM of certain services required for its ongoing Phase II trials of its EP-2101 therapeutic vaccine for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), plus access to expertise related to epitope identification.

IDM has seven products in clinical development, with Junovan the most advanced having finished a Phase III study in osteosarcoma.

This fall, the company confirmed plans to submit a marketing authorization application to the European Medicines Agency for Junovan, a liposomal form of muramyl tripeptide phosphatidylethanolamine designed for in vivo targeting of macrophages by intravenous infusion.

"We will have different options about Junovan, marketing it alone or in specific places [with a partner or without]," Loria told BioWorld Today, estimating about 1,000 patients in the U.S. and about the same number in Europe who are afflicted with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer diagnosed mainly in adolescents.

He acknowledged the patient population is "very limited, but these people don't have many alternatives" for treatment.

Earlier this month, IDM started the melanoma trial in Europe with its therapeutic vaccine Uvidem, which is under development in collaboration with Sanofi-Aventis Group, of Paris. The trial will recruit 50 patients with resected Stage II or III disease, and the primary objective is to evaluate a specific immune response to the vaccine after treatment with Uvidem, with or without peg-interferon alpha-2b.

Three other products are in Phase II trials in bladder cancer and NSCLC, and three are in Phase I for colorectal cancer, hepatitis B virus (HBV) and HIV infection.

Along with the partnership with Sanofi-Aventis in cancer immunotherapy, IDM has a deal with Innogenetics NV, of Ghent, Belgium, focused on vaccines for chronic HBV, hepatitis C virus and papilloma virus infection.