A Failed Heart Drug Becomes an Experimental Diabetes Drug
Posted by Jacob Goldstein
August 30, 2007, 2:50 pm
AtheroGenics’s stock has been on a tear since the company announced that new data on its “oral antidiabetic agent AGI-1067? would be presented at a scientific meeting in Europe next week.
Last we heard, AGI-1067 (also known as succinobucol) was a drug for patients who had been hospitalized because of a heart attack or unstable chest pain. But it failed to meet its primary goal in a study of those patients, and AstraZeneca, which had been working with AtheroGenics on the drug, abandoned the project.
We did a little looking and realized we’d missed this announcement from a couple months back that said AGI-1067 had become a diabetes drug, based on a finding from the study of heart patients that the drug lowered blood sugar in patients with diabetes. And just last week, the company said it had started enrolling patients in a diabetes trial.
easyir.com
Diabetes is certainly a big market, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in the trial of heart patients (which will be the source of the data presented next week), one patient developed liver failure, which went away after the drug was stopped. And the drug also seemed to raise liver enzymes in some patients. For the Bernstein analyst cited in this Forbes article,
forbes.com
that signal is reminiscent of the problems faced by Warner-Lambert’s Rezulin, pulled from the market in 2000, and AstraZeneca’s Exanta, which was never approved. (Pfizer was in the midst of acquiring Warner-Lambert when Rezulin was withdrawn.)
So it may take a lot of very strong data in diabetes patients to make regulators believe the drug’s benefits outweigh its possible risks to the liver.
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