Isis Ends Program, Still Has Options For Rheumatoid Arthritis Drug

Isis Pharma, antisense

Wall Street showed little reaction today after Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ISIS]]) said it would halt development of its antisense drug ISIS-CRPRx for treating rheumatoid arthritis. Isis shares lost 58 cents, or slightly less than 2 percent, in regular trading today, closing at $28.65 a share.

Isis said data from a mid-stage trial of the same drug for treating atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) is expected in the first half of 2014, and Isis would continue to test the drug in other diseases.

In a statement today, Isis reported results of a mid-stage clinical trial of 51 rheumatoid arthritis patients who had chronically elevated levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which is strongly associated with numerous inflammatory and cardiovascular diseases. Isis said its treatment reduced CRP levels by as much as 67 percent, but the overall improvements in rheumatoid arthritis symptoms were not statistically significant in comparison to a placebo group.

The company statement quotes Richard Geary, an Isis senior vice president of development, as saying, “We are pleased with the consistency of CRP lowering across all of our clinical studies, but we are disappointed that we did not see a greater impact on RA [rheumatoid arthritis] symptoms in these patients.”

Isis said study patients who were treated with the Isis drug “achieved substantial, dose-dependent reductions in CRP early in treatment [and] that were prolonged through the treatment process,” as well as improvements in the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. The improvements correlated with reductions in CRP, but were not sufficiently greater than improvements observed in the placebo groups to justify further development of the drug for rheumatoid arthritis, Isis said.

The treatment uses Isis’s proprietary “antisense” technology, which is intended to prevent a mutated gene from producing disease-causing proteins by binding to messenger RNA molecules during protein synthesis.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.