Tau­Rx takes a slice of pos­i­tive da­ta and claims suc­cess af­ter a failed PhI­II Alzheimer’s study

Tau­Rx raised more than $225 mil­lion from some un­con­ven­tion­al fi­nanc­ing sources to back their big pair of Phase III stud­ies for a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s. And they trav­eled to the Alzheimer’s As­so­ci­a­tion’s con­fer­ence in Toron­to to ac­knowl­edge that the first study failed on both end­points.

But that’s not stop­ping the com­pa­ny from claim­ing a suc­cess.

Tau­Rx CEO Claude Wis­chik says that in­ves­ti­ga­tors tracked a pos­i­tive re­sponse in a sub­group of pa­tients tak­ing the tau in­hibitor LMTX as a monother­a­py. And while he con­cedes he has no firm idea why that group ben­e­fit­ed when most pa­tients tak­ing a com­bi­na­tion of the drug with stan­dard of care showed ab­solute­ly iden­ti­cal re­spons­es to the con­trol arm, Tau­Rx switched the end­points on their sec­ond Phase III study — just ahead of the da­ta lock — to the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of pa­tients on monother­a­py. And he says they came up with a pos­i­tive read­out that could pave the way to an ap­proval.

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