Lund­beck sounds taps on an­oth­er CNS drug, re­treat­ing from a mine field still oc­cu­pied by a Mer­ck team

Lund­beck has snipped an­oth­er clin­i­cal-stage branch of its CNS re­search, dump­ing a schiz­o­phre­nia pro­gram af­ter de­ter­min­ing that their ther­a­py would have no pos­i­tive in­flu­ence on the dis­ease.

De­signed orig­i­nal­ly as a 240-pa­tient study, re­searchers set out in ear­ly 2019 to see if a home­grown drug dubbed Lu AF11167 could make it through a proof-of-con­cept study. The drug is a PDE10Ai in­hibitor, tar­get­ing an en­zyme which it said at the time of­fered a new path­way to re­tun­ing the body’s neu­ro­trans­mit­ter dopamine. The big idea was that by hit­ting their tar­get, the drug would mod­u­late “dopamine D1 and D2 re­cep­tor-me­di­at­ed in­tra­neu­ronal sig­nal­ing with­out bind­ing to these re­cep­tors,” in­flu­enc­ing neg­a­tive symp­toms of schiz­o­phre­nia.

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