Neuroscience
Roche drops a third Alzheimer’s candidate this year, terminating a partnership with UCB just four years after agreeing to work together on new treatments for the neurological disease.
Seaport Therapeutics, kick started by the former leaders of Karuna Therapeutics, has raised $225 million in an oversubscribed Series B to fund a pipeline of neuropsychiatric medicines.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman in a note to investors said the late-stage data for Vertex’s experimental non-opioid pain medication “reaffirms our confidence in the strength of suzetrigine’s profile.” However, William Blair analysts view these data as “an incremental positive” as the company faces challenges in targeting the acute pain market.
Wave Life Sciences in a Tuesday filing with the SEC said Takeda has elected to terminate its option to continue work on Wave’s WVE-003 clinical-stage Huntington’s disease program—a potential $5 billion commercial opportunity, according to the biotech.
Johnson & Johnson is cutting several programs—most of which are in neurology and psychiatry—as the company also pulls back from the infectious diseases market.
Under the deal, the Danish pharma will gain access to Longboard’s 5-HT2C receptor superagonist that is currently in late-stage development for seizures in various developmental and epileptic encephalopathies, including Dravet syndrome.
Since its inception in 1992, the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway has helped shepherd nearly 300 new drugs to the market. However, recent years have seen a number of high-profile market withdrawals and failed confirmatory trials.
Oditrasertib, which blocks the inflammatory RIPK1 protein, earlier this year also failed a Phase II trial in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, forcing the company to discontinue its development a few months later.
Sage has decided to discontinue the development of dalzanemdor in Alzheimer’s disease. A study of the candidate in Huntington’s is ongoing, with early data expected later this year.
With Monday’s data from SAPPHIRE, Scholar Rock is building toward regulatory submissions for apitegromab in spinal muscular atrophy in the first quarter of 2025.
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