Mu­ta­tions in a gene called MECP2 were iden­ti­fied as the cause of Rett Syn­drome in 1999 in­side a lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Bay­lor Col­lege of Med­i­cine — the same year, Ital­ian drug de­vel­op­er Newron Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals was born. On Mon­day, the com­pa­ny’s ex­per­i­men­tal drug, sari­zotan, failed a Phase II/III study in pa­tients with the se­vere neu­rode­vel­op­men­tal dis­or­der that has no ap­proved ther­a­pies.

In-li­censed from Mer­ck KGaA, the com­pound is de­signed to mod­u­late the ac­tiv­i­ty of neu­ro­trans­mit­ters and was aban­doned by the Ger­man drug­mak­er in 2006 af­ter a pair of failed piv­otal stud­ies in Parkin­son’s dis­ease. Now, Newron is al­so ter­mi­nat­ing its de­vel­op­men­tal pro­gram in Rett syn­drome.

The tri­al test­ed two dos­es of sari­zotan (10 mg and 20 mg) against a place­bo in 129 pa­tients with the dis­ease that al­most ex­clu­sive­ly af­fects fe­males, and is char­ac­ter­ized by a loss of ac­quired fine and gross mo­tor skills as well as neu­ro­log­i­cal, cog­ni­tive and au­to­nom­ic dys­func­tion, which leads to loss of abil­i­ty to con­duct dai­ly life ac­tiv­i­ties, walk or com­mu­ni­cate.

The main goal of the study — to in­duce a re­duc­tion in episodes of ap­nea dur­ing wak­ing time com­pared with place­bo — was not met, nei­ther were any sec­ondary goals. De­tailed da­ta will be pre­sent­ed at a lat­er date, Newron said.

Ravi Anand, Newron

“The re­sults of this well de­signed and ex­e­cut­ed study, based on high­ly promis­ing da­ta from a ge­net­ic mod­el of Rett syn­drome in mice, in­di­cate the dif­fi­cul­ties in­her­ent in trans­lat­ing ef­fects in an­i­mal mod­els to hu­man clin­i­cal stud­ies,” the com­pa­ny’s CMO Ravi Anand said in a state­ment.

The com­pa­ny’s shares cratered more than 68% on the Swiss stock ex­change to CHF 1.98.

“This high-risk pro­gramme was a key fo­cus for the stock, with sari­zotan un­der­pin­ning c.70% of our CHF40/share PT (price tar­get),” Jef­feries an­a­lysts wrote in a note.

New York biotech Anavex is an­oth­er com­pa­ny eval­u­at­ing its lead ex­per­i­men­tal drug, blar­came­sine, in pa­tients with Rett Syn­drome — in Feb­ru­ary, the FDA grant­ed the drug fast track sta­tus for the in­di­ca­tion. Aca­dia Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, the mak­er of the Parkin­son’s dis­ease drug Nu­plazid, has an ex­per­i­men­tal Rett syn­drome drug in late-stage de­vel­op­ment. GW Phar­ma, the first-ever com­pa­ny to get a nat­ur­al cannabis-de­rived ther­a­py ap­proved by the FDA, al­so has a CBD drug-in-de­vel­op­ment for Rett, while the cat tran­quil­iz­er ke­t­a­mine is al­so be­ing eval­u­at­ed by an aca­d­e­m­ic group for the con­di­tion.

Newron, mean­while, is now left with two eggs in its bas­ket. It gets roy­al­ty in­come from its Parkin­son’s dis­ease drug, Xada­go, which is sold by its part­ners in dif­fer­ent parts of the world. The oth­er drug in the com­pa­ny’s pipeline, eve­namide, is be­ing de­vel­oped for schiz­o­phre­nia, al­though Covid-19 has de­layed late-stage en­abling tri­als.

Despite the controversy of housing it in NIH, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra on Wednesday afternoon formally announced the establishment of the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an independent entity within the NIH, as HHS had previously stipulated that “NIH may not subject ARPA-H to NIH policies.”

Becerra also announced the appointment of ARPA-H’s inaugural employee, Adam Russell, who will serve as acting deputy director.

Flagship Pioneering, the incubator of Moderna and dozens of other biotechs, says it has landed upon tens of thousands of previously undiscovered human proteins. The VC shop wants to potentially turn them into therapeutics.

Like other drug developers that have turned proteins into therapeutics (think insulin for diabetes), Flagship’s latest creation, ProFound Therapeutics, wants to tap into this new trove of proteins as part of its mission to treat indications ranging from rare diseases to cancer to immunological diseases.

New data from HHS show that more than 162,000 courses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral Paxlovid were administered across the US over the past week, continuing a streak of increased usage of the pill, and signaling not only rising case numbers but more awareness of how to access it.

In comparison to this week, about 670,000 courses of the Pfizer pill have been administered across the first five months since Paxlovid has been on the US market, averaging about 33,000 courses administered per week in that time.