In the current environment, the large commitments that pharmaceutical companies must make to fully leverage late-stage pipelines often limit the resources needed to advance early-phase candidates.
Companies are forced to make trade-off decisions without clinical data and compounds are often shelved without a compelling rationale. Among these compounds are assets of substantial but unrealized medical and commercial value.
Flexion has formed partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms, including AstraZeneca and Merck Serono, to advance four such promising, clinically enabled compounds with potential in specialty indications.
The four compounds were chosen from over 140 potential drugs evaluated by the Flexion team. Each is benefitting from Flexion's efficient approach in generating clinically meaningful proof of concept (PoC) data, which increases the probability of drug launch.
"Flexion is built around its management's experience with Lilly's Chorus division, an experimental development group built around Flexion co-founder Neil Bodick, MD's notion of "truth-seeking behavior" in clinical development. The idea is to get a new molecule to proof-of-concept for less than $5 million and in less than two years." Roger Longman, The In Vivo Blog, October 2009