Longeveron's cell ther­a­py flops ear­ly walk test study as ex­ecs tout flim­sy sup­port­ing da­ta

Mi­a­mi biotech Longeveron has sold it­self to in­vestors on the promise of us­ing cell ther­a­py to im­prove the lives of ag­ing pa­tients un­able to walk for long dis­tances, but new da­ta don’t look promis­ing at all.

Longeveron’s lome­cel-B, a cell ther­a­py for ag­ing frailty, flopped the key six-minute walk test end­point of a Phase 2b tri­al of the drug, the biotech said Fri­day, and in­vestors weren’t pleased.

At 180 days, pa­tients re­ceiv­ing the drug post­ed no sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment on a walk test com­pared to place­bo, Longeveron said, “af­ter ad­just­ing for mul­ti­ple com­par­isons us­ing the Hochberg method” to de­ter­mine false dis­cov­ery. Lome­cel-B is an off-the-shelf prod­uct us­ing “med­i­c­i­nal sig­nal­ing cells” de­rived from healthy donors’ bone mar­row.

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