Warren Huff, Reata CEO

Rea­ta sug­gests Friedre­ich's atax­ia pro­gram could be de­layed, send­ing stock plung­ing

Rea­ta Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals $RE­TA made waves last Oc­to­ber when its drug omavelox­olone pro­duced pos­i­tive tri­al re­sults in treat­ing a rare neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der, but the can­di­date’s path for­ward be­came much murki­er Mon­day.

In a re­port of quar­ter­ly earn­ings, the biotech di­vulged that the FDA is con­sid­er­ing de­lay­ing omavelox­olone’s NDA pend­ing com­ple­tion of a sec­ond tri­al. That could push back ap­proval by at least a year giv­en that the tar­get pop­u­la­tion, in­di­vid­u­als with Friedre­ich’s atax­ia, is lim­it­ed and pro­gres­sion of the hard-to-treat ill­ness is no­to­ri­ous­ly slow. The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic would al­so hin­der Rea­ta’s abil­i­ty to com­plete an ad­di­tion­al tri­al.

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Venture & Research Associate

Alexandria Real Estate Equities

San Francisco, CA, USA