As­traZeneca, Mod­er­na start to raise the cur­tain on a new mR­NA heart drug — but ef­fi­ca­cy will have to wait

Can in­ject­ing mes­sen­ger RNA di­rect­ly in­to the heart of pa­tients who’ve ex­pe­ri­enced heart fail­ure help re­pair the or­gan? More than three years af­ter As­traZeneca and Mod­er­na launched a first-of-its-kind Phase II tri­al to test the idea, the pair has now shown the pro­ce­dure is at least safe.

In a Phase II tri­al dubbed EPIC­CURE, sev­en were treat­ed with AZD8601 — mR­NA-en­cod­ing vas­cu­lar en­dothe­lial growth fac­tor (VEGF-A) — while four were giv­en place­bo. Af­ter six months of fol­low-up, in­ves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed the drug met the pri­ma­ry end­points on safe­ty and tol­er­a­bil­i­ty, while the ex­plorato­ry ef­fi­ca­cy analy­ses sup­port fur­ther clin­i­cal eval­u­a­tion.

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