Lund­beck, Ot­su­ka take the lat­est hit on Alzheimer’s as PhI­II drug flops

Den­mark’s Lund­beck has just racked up the lat­est R&D dis­as­ter in Alzheimer’s, re­port­ing that its first Phase III study for its 5-HT6 ag­o­nist idalopir­dine failed.

Weak ef­fi­ca­cy scut­tled its at­tempt to hit the pri­ma­ry end­point on cog­ni­tion for both dos­es in the study. And the drug (Lu AE58054) al­so flopped on the sec­ondary goals, mak­ing this a com­plete rout.

That’s bad news for Ax­o­vant $AX­ON, which al­so has put a 5-HT6 ther­a­py in­to piv­otal stud­ies af­ter snatch­ing it from Glax­o­SmithK­line, which record­ed a se­ries of tri­al fail­ures be­fore aban­don­ing the ther­a­py. Ax­o­vant en­joyed a block­buster IPO with its high-risk for­ay in­to the field at the height of the biotech boom. Ax­o­vant’s shares took a sharp dive — drop­ping more than 20% — when the news broke to­day.

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