Merrimack Pharmaceuticals is a pharmaceutical company based in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. They specialize in developing drugs for the treatment of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

. Merrimack's first

FDA The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a federal agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the control and supervision of food ...

-approved drug was approved in 2015; Onivyde, a

liposome A liposome is a small artificial vesicle, spherical in shape, having at least one lipid bilayer. Due to their hydrophobicity and/or hydrophilicity, biocompatibility, particle size and many other properties, liposomes can be used as drug deliver ...

encapsulated version of

irinotecan Irinotecan, sold under the brand name Camptosar among others, is a medication used to treat colon cancer, and small cell lung cancer. For colon cancer it is used either alone or with fluorouracil. For small cell lung cancer it is used with cispl ...

is used for treating pancreatic adenocarcinoma. It was approved for use in the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...

the following year.

History

Merrimack was founded by a group of scientists from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 2000. In 2016, Merrimack had 426 full-time employees, 103 of which had an MD or PhD. In October 2016, CEO Robert Mulroy resigned and the company announced they would be laying off 20% of its employees. In January 2017, interim CEO Gary Crocker resigned and the board of directors appointed Richard Peters to be president and CEO. Peters previously worked at

Sanofi Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris, France. Originally, the corporation was established in 1973 and merged with Synthélabo in 1999 to form Sanofi-Synthélabo. In 2004, Sanofi-Syn ...

and was a faculty member at Harvard University. In January 2017, French pharmaceutical company

Ipsen Ipsen is a French biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Paris, France, with a focus on transformative medicines in three therapeutic areas: oncology, rare disease and neuroscience. Ipsen is one of the world’s top 15 biopharmaceutical com ...

announced they would be purchasing Onivyde from Merrimack for approximately $1 billion. On November 13, 2018, the statistical programming director Songjiang Wang, received "six months in prison and one year supervised released" after a guilty verdict was handed down to Wang from a

United States District Judge The United States district courts are the trial courts of the United States federal judiciary, U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each United States federal judicial district, federal judicial district, which each cover o ...

in July 2018 for securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Also on December 20, 2019, the

United States Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

charged Wang with

Insider trading Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company. In various countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information ...

Pipeline

Merrimack has four drugs in clinical development. * MM-302 –

HER2 Receptor tyrosine-protein kinase erbB-2 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''ERBB2'' gene. ERBB is abbreviated from erythroblastic oncogene B, a gene originally isolated from the avian genome. The human protein is also frequently refer ...

targeting

antibody-drug conjugate Antibody-drug conjugates or ADCs are a class of biopharmaceutical drugs designed as a targeted therapy for treating cancer. Unlike chemotherapy, ADCs are intended to target and kill tumor cells while sparing healthy cells. As of 2019, some 56 phar ...

* MM-121 ( seribantumab) – anti- HER3 monoclonal antibody * MM-141 ( istiratumab) –

IGF-1R The insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) receptor is a protein found on the surface of human cells. It is a transmembrane receptor that is activated by a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 ( IGF-1) and by a related hormone called IGF-2. ...

and HER3 bispecific monoclonal antibody * MM-151 – anti- EGFR mixture of monoclonal antibody

References

{{Pharmaceutical companies of the United States Pharmaceutical companies of the United States Life sciences industry Health care companies based in Massachusetts Pharmaceutical companies established in 2000 Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts 2000 establishments in Massachusetts Companies listed on the Nasdaq 2012 initial public offerings