Io­n­is, Akcea boost­ed by a pos­i­tive PhII for their No­var­tis castoff car­dio drug — and they plan to push ahead in­to piv­otals

Late last year No­var­tis aban­doned a car­dio drug from Io­n­is’ spin­off Akcea just af­ter the phar­ma gi­ant snapped up in­clisir­an, go­ing the RNAi way in guard­ing against heart dis­ease in the $9.7 bil­lion Med­co buy­out.

Now the phar­ma go­liath — which is head­ed down the PC­SK9 road with a drug it be­lieves can be used in a mass pop­u­la­tion — can get a clear­er pic­ture of just what they gave up.

Akcea $AK­CA and the moth­er com­pa­ny $IONS put out a state­ment ear­ly Wednes­day say­ing that their Phase II study of AKCEA-APOC­I­II-LR de­liv­ered sol­id ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta, with the high dose clear­ly out­per­form­ing place­bo in sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duc­ing triglyc­erides as a means to cut­ting the risk of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. In ad­di­tion, in­ves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed that the drug slashed apoC-III, very low-den­si­ty lipopro­tein and rem­nant cho­les­terol while boost­ing “good” HDL lev­els.

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