Ob­sE­va’s sec­ond uter­ine fi­broids PhI­II comes through, send­ing some in­vestors to the hills

In the three-com­pa­ny race to de­vel­op a new uter­ine fi­broid treat­ment, Ob­sE­va long lagged be­hind Ab­b­Vie and My­ovant. Still, they hoped that bet­ter ef­fi­ca­cy — in­clud­ing a 93.9% re­sponse rate in one Phase III tri­al — could ul­ti­mate­ly de­liv­er bet­ter sales.

Now, though, the sec­ond of those Phase III stud­ies is out, and it has brought the Swedish biotech back to earth.

In the sec­ond of their Phase III tri­als, 75.5% of pa­tients who took Ob­sE­va’s ex­per­i­men­tal tablet lin­zagolix plus a hor­mone saw their bleed­ing re­duced by at least 50% and at least 80 ml af­ter 24 weeks. Pool­ing those re­sults with new da­ta from their first Phase III tri­al — which showed a 93.9% re­sponse rate at 24 weeks and a 91.6% re­sponse rate at 52 weeks — Ob­sE­va cal­cu­lat­ed a col­lec­tive 84.7% re­spon­der rate for pa­tients tak­ing their ther­a­py and said the da­ta “con­firm po­ten­tial best-in-class” sta­tus.

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