An­oth­er one bites the dust: No­var­tis, Mol­e­c­u­lar Part­ners and their an­tivi­ral get the boot from NIH Covid study

Mol­e­c­u­lar Part­ners CEO Patrick Am­stutz knew go­ing in­to the NIH’s AC­TIV-3 study that the bar for enso­vibep was “very high.” A slew of Covid-19 an­ti­bod­ies had al­ready flunked out of the tri­al — and though their No­var­tis-backed an­ti­body al­ter­na­tive was dif­fer­ent, he ex­pressed cau­tious hope.

On Tues­day, how­ev­er, he re­vealed that enso­vibep didn’t clear that bar.

Enso­vibep’s AC­TIV-3 days are over af­ter fail­ing a fu­til­i­ty analy­sis in hos­pi­tal­ized Covid-19 pa­tients, the com­pa­ny an­nounced. The mol­e­cule comes from a class of drugs de­vel­oped by Mol­e­c­u­lar Part­ners that aims to per­form the same func­tions as an­ti­bod­ies with far more tar­get speci­fici­ty and an­tivi­ral pro­tec­tion.

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