Eisai and SFJ Pharmaceuticals to ally on clinical development

Eisai has announced a new partnership with SFJ Pharmaceuticals designed to accelerate its late-stage clinical development activities.

The partnership scheme will allow Eisai to take advantages of the external financial resources and capabilities offered by SFJ to conduct phase III studies of promising drug candidates.

Specifically, this collaboration will focus on a late-stage trial programme for E7080, a new thyroid cancer therapy, with the studies to be conducted by Eisai but wholly funded by SFJ.

It comes as part of a wider partnership scheme that Eisai hopes will allow it to pursue multiple promising late-stage clinical development programmes, making it easier for it to deliver new products to patients.

"Eisai seeks to bring new treatments to market as early as possible, and make further contributions to address the unmet medical needs of and increase the benefits provided to patients," the company said.

Last week, the firm attended the International Epilepsy Congress in Rome, where it presented a range of new clinical trial data on drugs such as perampanel and Zonegran.