Sanofi slash­es an­oth­er pro­gram for key mol­e­cule, while keep­ing hopes in hand­ful of rare dis­eases

Sev­er­al years ago, when Sanofi un­veiled a mol­e­cule to pre­vent the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of a cer­tain type of fat in cells, they fig­ured it would work in a hand­ful of rare dis­eases where the body can’t prop­er­ly clear tox­ic chem­i­cals. But they al­so had hopes and some bi­o­log­i­cal in­tu­ition that it might pro­vide a new way of treat­ing a cou­ple of larg­er dis­or­ders.

Those hopes have now come up emp­ty. Sanofi an­nounced Tues­day that it scrapped a piv­otal tri­al for the mol­e­cule, venglu­s­tat, in au­to­so­mal poly­cys­tic dom­i­nant kid­ney dis­ease — the most com­mon form of in­her­it­ed kid­ney dis­ease — af­ter an in­de­pen­dent re­view showed lit­tle dif­fer­ence be­tween pa­tients on the drug arm and pa­tients on the place­bo.

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