Bailing out

If we ever needed reminding of that fact, it should have come in this month's announcement by the European pharmaceutical company Merck Serano that it has decided that the experimental Parkinson's disease drug salfinamide won't be as strong a commercial drug as once thought. Consequently, the company, a unit of Germany's Merck KGaA, has handed back its rights to that drug to the small, Italy-based biotech company Newron Pharmaceuticals. Salfinamide, which is in late-stage development for use as an add-on to levodopa in treating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, is Newron's lead drug. Merck Serono, which gained rights to the Parkinson's drug in 2006, stated that "safinamide has a more limited market potential than originally anticipated by the company". The drug maker plans to cut support of the Phase III program after April 2012, a decision expected to cost the company about €40 million.Interestingly, the pharmaceutical company wasn't abandoning the drug because of safety or efficacy issues; it made the decision to shed the program as part of a review of its pipeline. Merck Serono is among a host of big pharmaceuticals that have chopped programs from their pipelines over the past year because of, among other things, limits on R&D spending in certain areas and the health-care systems of governments such as Germany's holding new drugs to higher standards before agreeing to pay for them. So Merck Serano's decision wouldn't be news were it not for the fact that prospective neurologic disease drugs have been hit particularly hard. Companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi have been ordering large cutbacks, not only of clinical trials but also of early research and development efforts on drugs that target diseases of the central nervous system. The private sector, it seems, is bailing on CNS drugs.It is doing so at a time when such drugs are about to be needed desperately. As birthrates in developed countries continue to fall (Italy's and Spain's are already below t