Rit­ter bombs fi­nal PhI­II for sole lac­tose in­tol­er­ance drug — shares plum­met

More than two years ago Rit­ter Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals man­aged to find enough sil­ver lin­ing in its Phase IIb/III study — af­ter miss­ing the top-line mark — to pro­pel its lac­tose in­tol­er­ance to­ward a con­fir­ma­to­ry tri­al. But as it turned out, the en­thu­si­asm on­ly set the biotech and its in­vestors up to be sore­ly dis­ap­point­ed.

This time around there’s lit­tle left to sal­vage. Not on­ly did RP-G28 fail to beat place­bo in re­duc­ing lac­tose in­tol­er­ance symp­toms, pa­tients in the treat­ment group ac­tu­al­ly av­er­aged a small­er im­prove­ment. On a com­pos­ite score mea­sur­ing symp­toms like ab­dom­i­nal pain, cramp­ing, bloat­ing and gas, pa­tients giv­en the drug had a mean re­duc­tion of 3.159 while the place­bo co­hort saw a 3.420 drop on av­er­age (one-sided p-val­ue = 0.0106).

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