Wave's Duchenne pro­gram comes to a screech­ing halt — now all eyes will be on Hunt­ing­ton's

Wave Life Sci­ences is fold­ing its hand in Duch­ene mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy af­ter an in­ter­im analy­sis of a Phase I open-la­bel ex­ten­sion tri­al re­vealed its lead drug sim­ply does not work.

In ad­di­tion to dis­con­tin­u­ing two tri­als in­volv­ing su­vodirsen, in­clud­ing a Phase II/III con­fir­ma­to­ry tri­al for the ex­on 51 skip­ping ther­a­py, the biotech is al­so sus­pend­ing fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of a dif­fer­ent mol­e­cule de­signed for pa­tients with mu­ta­tions amenable to ex­on 53 skip­ping.

The im­plo­sion trig­gered a 50% plunge on the stock $WVE, which is trad­ing now at $18.85 — re­flect­ing how, ahead of the bad news, “more than half of the in­vestors’ val­u­a­tion was DMD” ac­cord­ing to Stifel an­a­lyst Paul Mat­teis.

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