Just months af­ter its first FDA ap­proval, Idor­sia dumps binge-eat­ing drug can­di­date af­ter PhII fail

Idor­sia got a po­ten­tial block­buster drug ap­proval back in Jan­u­ary — the first ap­proval since the small Swiss biotech spun out in 2017. And while a team of hun­dreds of sales reps has hit the ground run­ning with the an­ti-in­som­nia drug now named Qu­viviq, the R&D team is back to the draw­ing board.

The com­pa­ny an­nounced this morn­ing that its can­di­date to treat binge-eat­ing, a se­lec­tive orex­in-1 re­cep­tor an­tag­o­nist called ACT-539313, failed to meet the pri­ma­ry end­point in a Phase II tri­al. Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment, the drug can­di­date “did not show an im­prove­ment over place­bo in re­duc­ing the num­ber of binge-eat­ing days per week in adult pa­tients with mod­er­ate to se­vere binge-eat­ing dis­or­der.”

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