Xen­cor’s lead drug fails a PhII test for lu­pus, shares slide

Shares of Xen­cor tum­bled Fri­day as the biotech tried to ex­plain — large­ly un­suc­cess­ful­ly — why the fail­ure of its Phase II lu­pus drug study was re­al­ly an over­all plus.

The mid-stage study of XmAb5871 en­rolled 104 pa­tients. But re­searchers said that the place­bo ef­fect was mag­ni­fied af­ter 10 pa­tients dropped out of the con­trol arm, com­pared to 2 in the drug arm. 

Mea­sur­ing the con­tin­ued im­prove­ment in pa­tients af­ter 225 days, the com­pa­ny said that the drug arm hit 42% com­pared to a 28.2% re­sponse in the place­bo arm. That qual­i­fied for a failed p val­ue of 0.18 on the pri­ma­ry end­point.

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