The top­i­cal treat­ment for alope­cia area­ta that Aclaris Ther­a­peu­tics li­censed from Rigel Phar­ma has failed a mid-stage study for alope­cia area­ta, leav­ing the com­pa­ny with a drug that seems to have caused no harm but no ben­e­fit ei­ther.

Neal Walk­er Aclaris

While ex­ecs vowed to find a pos­si­ble way for­ward with sub­group analy­sis, the re­sults didn’t leave much room for hope. Nei­ther the 0.46% or 0.12% con­cen­tra­tions of ATI-502 proved su­pe­ri­or to place­bo in im­prov­ing scalp hair cov­er­age — at least not in a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant way. In fact, an un­ex­pect­ed­ly ef­fec­tive ve­hi­cle out­per­formed the low­er dose on sev­er­al end­points, which were al­ter­na­tive mea­sure­ments of hair loss sever­i­ty.

“We are sur­prised and ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ed by the re­sults of this Phase 2 tri­al,” pres­i­dent and CEO Neal Walk­er said in a state­ment.

So were in­vestors. Aclaris’ stock $ACRS has tum­bled 32.58% since the an­nounce­ment Wednes­day at mar­ket close and now sits at $3.00.

It con­tin­ues a down­ward tra­jec­to­ry trig­gered by the FDA’s re­quest for Aclaris to pull a pro­mo­tion­al video on a dif­fer­ent treat­ment sev­er­al days ago, stat­ing that the ad “makes false or mis­lead­ing claims” re­gard­ing their hy­dro­gen per­ox­ide top­i­cal so­lu­tion, Es­ka­ta, for raised se­b­or­rhe­ic ker­atoses.

Aclaris is now pin­ning its hopes on the up­com­ing Phase II read­out of ATI-501, an oral JAK1/JAK3 in­hibitor that goes af­ter the same dis­ease. The ba­sic mech­a­nism re­mains the same — stop­ping T cells from launch­ing an at­tack on fol­li­cle cells — but the hope is it will work for more se­vere pa­tients.

Both ATI-501 and ATI-502 were sub­jects of a 2017 li­cense agree­ment, where Aclaris paid Rigel $8 mil­lion up­front for world­wide rights.

“From a hair loss per­spec­tive we still re­main fo­cused on the cat­e­go­ry broad­ly and look for­ward to the re­sults of the oral work lat­er this year,” a sub­dued Walk­er told an an­a­lyst on a con­fer­ence call.

While the biotech al­so counts a “soft top­i­cal” JAK in its ar­se­nal — ob­tained from a $20 mil­lion buy­out of St. Louis-based Con­flu­ence Life Sci­ences — Walk­er said they are more in­ter­est­ed in de­ploy­ing it for oth­er types of hair loss as well as atopic der­mati­tis.

Aclaris is al­so test­ing ATI-502 for vi­tili­go, an­dro­ge­net­ic alope­cia and atopic der­mati­tis while await­ing Phase III re­sults for A-101, a top­i­cal ther­a­py for com­mon warts.

So­cial im­age: Shut­ter­stock

Discovery Life Sciences has acquired what claims to be the Maryland-based host of the world’s largest hepatocyte inventory, known as IVAL, to help researchers select more effective and safer drug candidates in the future.

The combined companies will now serve a wider range of drug research and development scientists, according to Albert Li, who founded IVAL in 2004 and is set to join the Discovery leadership team as the CSO of pharmacology and toxicology.

Researchers may be nearing an answer for the mysterious and life-threatening blood clots that appeared on very rare occasions in people who received the J&J or AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

The new work builds on an early hypothesis researchers in Norway put forward last spring, when the cases first cropped up. They proposed the events were similar to blood clots that can occur in a small subset of patients who receive heparin, one of the most commonly used blood thinners.

Two and a half years after driving his antisense oligonucleotide platform to Wall Street, Stoke Therapeutics CEO Ed Kaye is painting a fuller picture of the company’s first clinical data. And though the trial wasn’t powered to detect statistical significance, Kaye says the readout shows early signs of efficacy in kids with a rare, drug-resistant form of epilepsy

STK-001 was well-tolerated in single and multiple doses in 22 Dravet syndrome patients between the ages of 2 and 18 years old, Stoke announced on Friday. What’s more, 12 of the 17 evaluable patients at the time (70.6%) saw reductions from baseline in convulsive seizure frequency, according to the company.