Q. Bisantrene is not new. How can RAC monetise if it is out of patent?, page-32

I can’t tell you why the Race before my time came to believe bisantrene was lost due to merger and acquisitions beyond that was the story that was believed internally. When I joined Race I asked what evidence there was for this story and I never was shown anything convincing.

I have actually gone back and spoken to the people who worked at Lederle at the time to find out why bisantrene was abandoned. While the full story is complex, the basic version is bisantrene was a pain to use (because of the precipitation/crystalisation problem) compared to Lederle’s other chemotherapeutic in development at the time, mitoxantrone. They tried to reformulate bisantrene without success and eventual gave up and just advanced mitoxantrone to approval.

Having had to work with the original formulation I can understand why Lederle decided to abandon bisantrene in favour of mitoxantrone. The thing that most amazes me is how many clinicians kept using bisantrene given its serious problems - the only reason for this is it worked really well.