Antigenics CEO Garo Armen had cause for alarm on a Wednesday afternoon in March. From his 21st-floor office above Rockefeller Center in New York City, he learned that after 12 years and more than $425 million spent developing the company's flagship compound, a cancer vaccine called Oncophage, the most recent Phase III clinical data were far from perfect. Armen faced then what he estimates about 80% of all biotech companies face at some point: the potential clinical failure of its lead product. By extension, this put the survival of the company in question.
This wasn't the first time Antigenics had gotten bad news about Oncophage. On October 10, 2005, the company revealed that preliminary data from its first Phase III trial, aimed at metastatic melanoma, did not show increased benefit over chemotherapeutics, biologic agents, and/or surgery. But, Armen notes, the Phase III Oncophage data did seem to show that patients' ...
