News brief­ing: Pox­el flash­es ear­ly pos­i­tive NASH re­sults; Io­n­is teams up with AI-fo­cused Ge­nu­ity Sci­ence

A day af­ter Gen­fit an­nounced they were slash­ing staff in the wake of a ma­jor NASH fail­ure, an­oth­er French biotech said they had achieved pos­i­tive re­sults in their lat­est study on the fat­ty liv­er dis­ease.

Pox­el, which is de­vel­op­ing a small mol­e­cule ki­nase ac­ti­va­tor for the con­di­tion, said that in a 12o-per­son tri­al, its drug proved safe and sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced liv­er fat lev­els com­pared to place­bo.  For the high-dose it was an 18% re­duc­tion, com­pared to a 0.7% re­duc­tion on place­bo. There was al­so a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sign­f­i­cant re­duc­tion in liv­er en­zymes com­pared to place­bo and a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in the per­cent­age  of pa­tients who saw at least a 30% re­duci­ton in liv­er fat: 6.5% of the place­bo group and 27.6%   of the high-dose group.

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