LEIDEN, Netherlands and LONDON, Jan. 13, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Prosensa Holding N.V. (Nasdaq:RNA) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) today announced that Prosensa has regained all rights from GSK to drisapersen and will retain rights to all other programs for the treatment of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). This transfer of rights represents the termination of the collaboration agreement between GSK and Prosensa executed in 2009. Prosensa will now have the full, unencumbered rights to continue the development of drisapersen as well as each of its DMD programs.
The parties have agreed that Prosensa is well suited to continue the development of all of the DMD programs. Prosensa and GSK have also agreed to make certain data from the drisapersen studies available in due course to the scientific community for the purpose of furthering the general understanding of DMD.
“We are fully committed to our mission of developing innovative, RNA-based therapeutics to address unmet medical needs for patients with rare genetic disorders,” said Hans Schikan, Prosensa’s Chief Executive Officer. “Prosensa is now in a favorable strategic position to advance the DMD portfolio, which includes drisapersen and five additional compounds, three of which are currently in clinical development. We will continue to work closely with patient groups, investigators, academia and regulators to ensure that we do everything we can to bring treatments to boys affected by DMD.”
“We have completed our review and believe that further analysis of drisapersen data may benefit from being viewed in the context of the body of information which has been developed by Prosensa through their work on additional exon-skipping programs. We greatly valued the scientific expertise that Prosensa provided since our collaboration started in 2009.” said Dr Carlo Russo, Senior Vice President, Head of GSK Rare Diseases Research & Development. “We worked closely with Prosensa with the aim of developing new medicines to help boys with DMD and thanks to the dedication of the boys and their families, we have gathered the largest clinical dataset related this condition. The value of this data to the scientific community’s understanding of DMD should not be underestimated, and we would like to thank everyone who participated in the studies for their contributions and patience as we worked through our analyses.”
Prosensa’s Schikan, added “GSK has been a valuable development partner, and we are grateful for the commitment made by the company over the last four years to develop a disease modifying therapy for this devastating disease. Together we have been able to progress the largest global clinical program in DMD, and we have made tremendous progress in understanding the natural history and epidemiology of this rare and devastating disease. We look forward to updating the community with our plans as soon we are in a position to do so.”
