Sanofi to stop developing experimental lung cancer drug after trial failure

Sanofi will stop developing an experimental lung cancer medicine after it failed to impress in a late-stage trial.

The French drugmaker is terminating the program for tusamitamab ravtansine, an antibody-based treatment that failed to outperform a chemotherapy in treating some patients with metastatic non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer, according to a statement on Thursday.

While the decision is a setback to Sanofi’s pipeline of new medi-cines, some analysts had warned that the therapy faced a challenging road ahead. Berenberg’s Luisa Hector gave the drug a potential peak sales potential of €1.5 billion ($1.64 billion) but said it had just a 20 percent probability of succeeding, in a note to clients in September.

Sanofi has laid out ambitious plans to bolster its pipeline of new medicines, abandoning some earlier profit targets in favor of investing more in drug development. Earlier this month, the company forecast more than €10 billion in annual sales from recent launches and future medicines by 2030, almost twice what many analysts had expected.

Sanofi said it will continue to explore the potential of drugs like tusamitamab ravtansine in treating some cancer types.