Wyeth owned a big chunk of biotech concern Immunex , which Amgen bought last year.
In fact, both Amgen and Immunex have valued each other's approach enough to copy it.
The two biochemists met in the late 1980s, soon after Smith arrived at Immunex.
Smith and Goodwin and their Immunex colleagues discovered nearly a dozen new TNF relatives.
Immunex quickly expanded to a longer-term 47-patient trial, more results from which will be reported next month.
After hearing about Enbrel, Dr. Mann called Immunex in 1994 and proposed testing it in heart failure patients.
So why is Immunex (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people ) getting rid of Leukine?
Before the deal closed, Amgen sent out a team of a hundred troubleshooters to fix Immunex's production delays.
Immunex is now sponsoring preliminary human tests to see if Enbrel can help in leukemia, lung and ovarian tumors.
The name TNF "is a misnomer, " says Ann Hayes, Immunex senior medical director.
Immunex had badly underestimated demand for Enbrel, its breakthrough drug for rheumatoid arthritis.
By contrast Amgen's buyout last year of Immunex, which had been working on similar projects, boosted the Amgen research efforts.
Remicade acts through a mechanism similar to Enbrel, a drug made by Immunex (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people ).
After a bumpy road through human trials--Enbrel flopped as a sepsis remedy before Immunex found the arthritis application--it won approval in late 1998.
Some of the coolest prospects in the pipeline come from a wealth of new genetic insights unearthed at Amgen and Immunex in the 1990s.
Immunex has built new facilities to keep up with the demand.
The deal makes tremendous sense for both companies: Immunex had to get rid of Leukine because the drug stood in the way of its merger with Amgen.
The similarities between Amgen (nasdaq: AMGN - news - people ) and Immunex (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people ) are striking.
Big biotech names like Genentech, Immunex and Imclone vanished, too.
And so I started working at Immunex as a scientist.
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He and fellow laboratory scientist Christopher Henney founded Immunex (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people )in 1981 and stuck around for its first few drug approvals.
Immunex waged a 12-year struggle to make the drug, one of the early fruits resulting from insights into the immune system and how it goes awry in various diseases.
Amgen is studying a drug that has a mechanism very similar to Enbrel's, and Immunex has been developing another rheumatoid arthritis treatment that works on the same target as Kineret.
In an eight-year heyday in the 1990s at Immunex, the two men helped discover some of the most important new drug targets in decades, unearthing a family of immune-system genes.
Another reason the deal looks sour: Amgen will have to buy the 41% stake that American Home Products (nyse: AHP - news - people ) has in Immunex.
Immunex and American Home Products, which owns 55% of Immunex, recently began a final-stage study of 1, 800 patients to answer the key question: Does Enbrel prolong the lives of heart failure subjects?
Immunex (nasdaq: IMNX - news - people ) comes with a gem of a drug: Enbrel, a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis that may also treat other conditions, including psoriasis.
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