AstraZeneca takes a hit in London following the failure of the Wainua trial for heart disease

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - AstraZeneca’s share price has taken a hit following the unexpected failure of a trial for heart disease involving Wainua, a drug already used to treat neurological conditions and developed in collaboration with the US firm Ionis. The share price in London is dragging down the FTSE 100 by 8 per cent, after the British pharmaceutical company announced that the drug had failed to meet its target of reducing cardiovascular deaths and recurrences of heart problems in a late-stage trial. The treatment was developed in collaboration with the US firm Ionis Pharmaceuticals, which had already lost 15% in pre-market trading on Wall Street, and focused on transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, a rare heart condition.

Sharon Barr, Executive Vice-President of AstraZeneca’s BioPharmaceuticals R&D division, said: “The CARDIO-TTRansform study was designed to assess the role of Wainua, a gene-silencing therapy, in addition to the current standard of care, in reducing recurrent cardiovascular events and mortality. Although the study did not meet its primary endpoint, we believe the results contribute to a greater scientific understanding of therapeutic approaches for the hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide affected by this progressive and often fatal condition.”

The announcement that the trial had failed took analysts and the market by surprise: according to experts at Bernstein, the negative results are ‘unexpected’. “We have just spoken to AstraZeneca, which is extremely disappointed and surprised by this news, and so are we,” they emphasise. The company had recently doubled the size of the trial to 1,400 patients to increase the chances of achieving positive and statistically robust results on the primary endpoint across the entire population, explains Bernstein. The failure also marks a setback for AstraZeneca’s ambitions to expand its scope beyond the company’s more traditional areas. Wainua is currently approved in over 20 countries for the treatment of transthyretin hereditary amyloidosis polyneuropathy in adults, a rare neurological condition. In the European Union, it is marketed under the name Wainzua.