Hair Loss News

CAMBRIDGE, Mass - Curis has announced that its agreement with Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals to develop a topically applied Hedgehog agonist for hair growth has been terminated.

Procter & Gamble notified Curis that it has decided to terminate the collaboration agreement with Curis because the Hedgehog agonist compounds did not demonstrate an acceptable safety profile. Pursuant to the collaboration agreement, the agreement will terminate in six months.

Curis’ broad Hedgehog agonist program was exclusively licensed to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals in January 2004. Under the terms of the license agreement with Wyeth, Curis retained the right to develop Hedgehog agonists to treat or prevent skin diseases or disorders, subject to Wyeth’s right to approve any Hedgehog agonist compounds that could be used to advance Curis’ retained programs. In 2005, Wyeth approved a group of Hedgehog agonist compounds for use in the Procter & Gamble hair growth collaboration.

Daniel R. Passeri, President and Chief Executive Officer of Curis, said, “We are obviously disappointed that the collaboration with Procter & Gamble will come to an end. We believe that our topically administered Hedgehog agonists have demonstrated encouraging efficacy in preclinical hair growth models and we were hopeful that one of our Hedgehog agonist drug candidates under the program would have progressed. Safety profiles are especially important for these drug candidates since, unlike our drug candidates for cancer and stroke, male pattern baldness is not a life threatening disease. While this represents a setback for this particular program, we continue to remain optimistic about the progress of our other programs, particularly our Hedgehog antagonist program currently in a Phase I clinical trial and under collaboration with Genentech and our proprietary drug candidates including CUDC-101 and other multitarget inhibitors that we are developing under our Targeted Cancer Drug Development Platform.”