Pharmaceutical developer Humanigen has filed for bankruptcy, attributing its financial problems largely to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of its COVID-19 drug in 2021, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company, once controlled by convicted pharma fraudster Martin Shkreli, sought protection from creditors Wednesday with unsecured debts of $44.1 million, while listing assets of $521,000. Humanigen is fending off lawsuits by manufacturers and marketers over its inability to pay for services it procured in anticipation of selling the drug. The company said that its antibody medicine lenzilumab showed promise in treating COVID-19 patients with pneumonia early in the pandemic. Humanigen raised more than $140 million through two stock sales in 2020 even though it had generated little revenue and the drug candidate hadn’t been approved. Humanigen signed agreements with companies that year that would manufacture, package and market lenzilumab. But in September 2021, the FDA declined to give emergency-use authorization to lenzilumab to treat COVID patients because it said it failed to establish the potential benefits outweighed the potential risks, according to a regulatory filing.
