Put aside for a moment the curiosity of why anyone would believe aspirin and fish oil might be an effective treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare, degenerative disease. There’s a more useful lesson from Monday evening’s Catabasis Pharma blowup: No amount of spinning bad data will turn a failed drug into an effective one.
Catabasis said its experimental drug, called edasalonexent, did not improve the muscle function of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy compared to a placebo. The outcome of the Phase 3 study is the end for the drug, and quite likely the entire company.
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-xent is not on the list of FDA approved suffixes/endings for generic drugs (at least according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_nomenclature). Strange, it makes it sound like a bonified drug rather than a combination of fish oil and aspirin). I wonder how it got that official non-propriatary name. Or, is it an official name.
I believe it could have that name because it was still classified as an NCE despite being formulated from two generic products.