David Woodhouse, NGM CEO

Mer­ck part­ner NGM Bio takes stock beat­ing af­ter PhII fail­ure in late-stage eye dis­ease

NGM Bio just found it­self on the bad end of a clin­i­cal tri­al read­out, and in­vestors are re­spond­ing harsh­ly.

The San Fran­cis­co biotech and long-stand­ing Mer­ck part­ner re­port­ed that a sham-con­trolled Phase II tri­al in­ves­ti­gat­ing a mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body for ge­o­graph­ic at­ro­phy, a late stage ver­sion of dry age-re­lat­ed mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion, did not meet the pri­ma­ry end­point.

Over 52 weeks, the biotech in­ject­ed its can­di­date, NGM621, in­to the back of the eye once every four weeks in 108 pa­tients and once every eight weeks in 104 pa­tients — adding four weeks in the end for ad­di­tion­al mon­i­tor­ing. While the in­jec­tions showed a re­duc­tion in the rate of change in GA le­sion size by 6.3% and 6.5% com­pared to the 106 pa­tients on place­bo, nei­ther arm reached sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.