Lit­tle Cona­tus' No­var­tis-part­nered liv­er drug suf­fers third straight de­feat, but CEO Men­to is still hold­ing out hope

Lit­tle Cona­tus’ No­var­tis-part­nered liv­er drug is one step clos­er to the scrap heap, with its third mid-stage fail­ure.

The Swiss drug­mak­er hand­ed the San Diego-based biotech $50 mil­lion up­front and an in­jec­tion of con­fi­dence in late 2016 to li­cense the drug, em­ri­c­as­an. Since then, it has flopped in a tri­fec­ta of stud­ies. An­oth­er Phase II study is ex­pect­ed to read­out lat­er this year.

The 318-pa­tient tri­al, dubbed EN­CORE-NF, was test­ing two dos­es (5 mg, 50 mg) of the drug against a place­bo in biop­sy-con­firmed NASH and liv­er fi­bro­sis pa­tients. Em­ri­c­as­an missed the pri­ma­ry end­point of im­prov­ing fi­bro­sis by ≥1 on the val­i­dat­ed Clin­i­cal Re­search Net­work (CRN) stage sys­tem, with no wors­en­ing of steato­hep­ati­tis com­pared to place­bo at week 72, the com­pa­ny said late Thurs­day.

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