Roche Scraps Alzheimer’s Drug Trial on Disappointing Results
(Bloomberg) — Roche Holding AG said a trial of an experimental medicine for Alzheimer’s disease yielded disappointing results, adding to a long list of failures in the effort to find a treatment for the leading cause of dementia.
The study of gantenerumab in people with the early stages of Alzheimer’s was halted after an interim analysis designed to assess whether the drug was working, Basel, Switzerland-based Roche said in a statement today. Shares of MorphoSys AG, Roche’s partner on the drug, fell the most in a decade.
“We are disappointed with these study results because people with early stage Alzheimer’s need new medicines that delay disease progression,” Sandra Horning, Roche’s chief medical officer and head of global product development, said in the statement.
Only a handful of drugs are approved to manage symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and there are none to treat the cause. There have been more than 100 failed efforts to develop a treatment for the neurodegenerative disease since 1998, according to a 2012 report from a drug-industry group.
MorphoSys fell 8.9 percent to 79.02 euros at 10:20 a.m. in Frankfurt. Shares of the Martinsried, Germany-based company dropped as much as 13 percent, the biggest intraday loss since Nov. 11, 2004.
Roche slumped 5 percent to 274.20 Swiss francs. The company also reported today that another trial combining two of its breast cancer drugs failed.
The failure of the Alzheimer’s trial is “not a huge surprise” because it was using an approach that hasn’t worked for any other company, Fabian Wenner, an analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich, wrote in a note today. Eric Le Berrigaud, said he hadn’t been predicting any sales for gantenerumab and, while other analysts may have had estimates, they would have been very low.
Another Roche-sponsored trial of gantenerumab, in Alzheimer’s patients with mild dementia, will continue, the companies said. Gantenerumab also is being studied in individuals who have a genetic predisposition for the disease.
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Geneva at sbennett9@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net Kim McLaughlin
