Vaxart re­ports PhII de­feat for a lega­cy an­tivi­ral from Avi­ra­gen — shares slide

When Vaxart picked Avi­ra­gen Ther­a­peu­tics for the re­verse merg­er that got it on the Nas­daq, the South San Fran­cis­co biotech high­light­ed a Phase II treat­ment for condy­lo­ma caused by HPV as par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing among the an­tivi­ral pro­grams it was in­her­it­ing. Sev­en months lat­er, Vaxart is find­ing out the drug, like many of Avi­ra­gen’s pre­vi­ous ther­a­pies, might be a fail­ure af­ter all.

Vaxart re­ports to­day that teslex­ivir (BTA074) has flunked the pri­ma­ry ef­fi­ca­cy end­point: com­plete clear­ance of base­line condy­lo­ma, or small bumps on gen­i­tals, by week 16. In a dou­ble blind tri­al eval­u­at­ing the teslex­ivir 5% gel in 218 pa­tients, on­ly 30.6% of the drug arm — not a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence from 23.3% in the place­bo group — com­plete­ly cleared base­line condy­lo­ma by week 16.

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