Biotech firm Amgen and Japanese pharma company Takeda have pulled their lung cancer drug candidate motesanib from phase III trials, after reports of higher than usual death rates among patients (press release, covered by Reuters, Bloomberg, Fierce Biotech)

The drug was being tested for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, and the trial was halted on the advice of an independent data monitoring committee. The news comes only days after news reports about another Amgen drug in phase I trials that works by starving tumour cells of blood in a similar way to motesanib. It isn’t yet clear whether the latest news will affect Amgen’s other pipeline drugs, although Roger Perlmutter, executive vice president of R&D at Amgen, said that this kind of outcome has been seen in similar drugs before.

“While we are disappointed in this outcome, it is consistent with data seen with some other anti-VEGF therapies and appears to constitute a class effect of these types of agents,” Perlmutter said in the Amgen release