The tortuous saga of breast-cancer blockbuster-to-be Trodelvy appears to be nearing a conclusion in New Jersey federal court.
Under a proposed settlement, Gilead Sciences’ Immunomedics would shell out $4 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it violated securities laws by distorting the info it planned to present at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO’s) 2016 annual meeting.
Almost six years ago, Immunomedics teased an ASCO data drop pertaining to its triple-negative breast cancer candidate IMMU-132, which won FDA approval in April 2020 as Trodelvy. Problem was, the data were old and had already been presented at another industry congress. ASCO ultimately booted Immunomedics from the meeting in 2016.
Investors later sued, arguing Immunomedics misled the public about the nature of the data it planned to present.
The hype around the new data drop at the prestigious medical conference “drove up the price of Immunomedics stock, and defendants were able to time the sales of stock to take advantage of the higher stock price before it became clear that there were no previously undisclosed new results,” a complaint from 2019 states. “All results had previously been presented weeks earlier at a conference in Boston,” the document continued.
In response to the suit, Immunomedics and the three former execs named as defendants largely denied the charges against them.
Late last week, the lead plaintiff filed a memo in court outlining the proposed settlement.
Despite the ASCO fiasco, Immunomedics’ investors ultimately got a big payday courtesy of the company’s $21 billion acquisition by Gilead, with some analysts suggesting at the time that Gilead overpaid.
Immunomedics’ drug prospect sacituzumab govitecan, for its part, won its green light and was christened Trodelvy in April 2020. Evaluate Pharma has forecasted $1.44 billion in 2024 sales for the antibody-drug conjugate, which collected a total of $380 million in 2021 sales.
After closing the Immunomedics acquisition, Gilead recently telegraphed 114 layoffs at the company’s Morris Plains, New Jersey, site.