Pssst: That big Bio­haven Alzheimer's study? It was a bust. Even the sub­group analy­sis ex­ecs tout­ed was a flop

You know it’s bad when a bio­phar­ma play­er plucks out a sub­group analy­sis for a pos­i­tive take — even though it was way off the sta­tis­ti­cal mark for suc­cess, like every­thing else.

So it was for Bio­haven $BHVN on MLK Mon­day, as the biotech re­port­ed on the hol­i­day that their Phase II/III Alzheimer’s study for tro­r­ilu­zole flunked both co-pri­ma­ry end­points as well as a key bio­mark­er analy­sis.

The drug — a re­vised ver­sion of the ALS drug rilu­zole de­signed to reg­u­late glu­ta­mate — did not “sta­tis­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­en­ti­ate” from place­bo on the Alzheimer’s Dis­ease As­sess­ment Scale-Cog­ni­tive Sub­scale 11 (ADAS-cog) and the Clin­i­cal De­men­tia Rat­ing Scale Sum of Box­es (CDR-SB).  The “hip­pocam­pal vol­ume” as­sess­ment by MRI al­so failed to dis­tin­guish it­self from place­bo for all pa­tients fit­ting the mild-to-mod­er­ate dis­ease pro­file they had es­tab­lished for the study.

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