Fu­eled by ear­ly suc­cess, Enan­ta paves way for mid-stage RSV study in adult pa­tients lat­er this year

RSV, a field lit­tered with fail­ure, has an­oth­er hope­ful.

On Fri­day, Enan­ta Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals showed that its ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ment, EDP-938, con­ferred a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in the res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­cy­tial virus (RSV) vi­ral load in healthy adults in­oc­u­lat­ed with the virus. Now comes the hard part.

“While we view to­day’s pos­i­tive re­sults from the Phase 2a hu­man chal­lenge study as en­cour­ag­ing, we an­tic­i­pate that re­sults from the Phase 2b will go a much longer way as to de­ter­min­ing whether EDP-938 is a vi­able treat­ment for RSV…We think the path to com­mer­cial­iza­tion here is par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate, giv­en that RSV in­fec­tion re­solves fair­ly quick­ly with­out in­ter­ven­tion and the key will be show­ing a dif­fer­ence in terms of time to res­o­lu­tion,” Baird’s Bri­an Sko­r­ney wrote in a note.

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER