CombinatoRx shares crater on trial failure

On a very bad day to release discouraging news, CombinatoRx [1] announced that its lead therapy failed to hit its primary endpoint in a mid-stage trial for osteoarthritis. Its shares cratered, dropping 83 percent. The trial pitted Synavive against a placebo in reducing pain among patients walking on a flat surface.

"Encouraging earlier data from both the Phase IIa clinical trials and molecular mechanism of action led us to have high expectations for Synavive, and although it is gratifying to see the biology of the synergy as well as steroid dissociation in this preliminary data, the results in knee osteoarthritis overall are disappointing. The results contain some observations that are difficult to reconcile, and we intend to complete additional analysis of the data in order to further our understanding of Synavive's biology and determine appropriate next steps," said Alexis Borisy, President and CEO of CombinatoRx.

Some positive spin: "While these outcomes are a setback for the Synavive program, we remain convinced in the power of the CombinatoRx discovery platform and approach. We have many valuable assets, including CRx-401, our product candidate for Type 2 diabetes and CRx-197 for topical dermatology, both expecting Phase 2a clinical data in the next few months, as well as programs such as CRx-191 and new emerging programs such as in B-cell malignancies and a next generation version of Synavive."

- check out CombinatoRx's release [2]
- read the report [3] from RTT News

Related Articles:
Emerging Drug Developer: CombinatoRx [1]
New combos of old drugs may be boon to biotech [4]
CombinatoRx dumps RA program as data fails to add up [5] (June 2007)