Li­cens­ing As­traZeneca castoff, Bio­haven preps PhI­II ef­fort in new neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive in­di­ca­tion

Bio­haven $BHVN has added an­oth­er drug off of As­traZeneca’s shelf to its neu­rol­o­gy pipeline.

Com­ing with a pack­age of da­ta from four Phase I and three Phase IIa stud­ies, AZD3241 in­hibits myeloper­ox­i­dase, or MPO, a key dri­ver of in­flam­ma­to­ry process that’s ob­served in high lev­els in a range of brain dis­or­ders.

The biotech plans to test the drug — now re­named BHV3241 — in a Phase III tri­al as a treat­ment of mul­ti­ple sys­tem at­ro­phy, hav­ing seen pre­lim­i­nary re­sults from a small Phase IIa tri­al that showed a no­table bio­mark­er re­sponse and “nu­mer­i­cal im­prove­ments” on the Uni­fied MSA Rat­ing Scale af­ter 12 weeks of treat­ment.

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