Axovant Sciences (AXON), 2017’s most talked-about biotech company, is abandoning the drug that made it famous after yet another clinical trial failure.
The company, valued at more than $2.8 billion in September, will no longer study intepirdine after finding the drug to be useless against dementia with Lewy bodies, a memory-destroying disease that can affect mood and balance. Last year, intepirdine failed in a 1,300-patient Alzheimer’s disease trial, sending Axovant’s share price down more than 75 percent.
In the study of 269 patients with dementia with Lewy bodies, two doses of intepirdine were virtually indistinguishable from placebo in measures of motor function, cognition, and gait. The low dose of the drug, 35 milligrams a day, actually worsened patients’ symptoms compared with placebo.
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