Yet another company is developing a new drug for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and this time, the drug is intended for non-obstructive HCM patients. The company is Imbria Pharmaceuticals, and this week they announced the randomizing of the first patient in their Phase 2 study of the drug IMB-101 in patients with non-obstructive HCM. The study, called IMPROVE-HCM, is a Phase 2 study that will look at the safety and tolerability of this drug in non-obstructed HCM patients. IMB-101 is designed to increase the efficiency of the heart’s use of energy which will be measured through cardiopulmonary exercise testing over a 12 week period.
More positive data about the Bristol Myers Squibb experimental drug mavacamten was revealed at last weekend’s American College of Cardiology meeting and simultaneously published in The Lancet.
The data showed improvement in how patients felt taking the drug, as reported and quantified by the patients themselves. The clinical trial participants filled out a questionnaire called the KCCQ, or Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, 6 different times over the 38 weeks that the trial was ongoing.
Analysis of these responses showed that just over a third of patients who took mavacamten reported a substantial improvement in symptoms, though not all participants responded to the drug. And, it is important to note that the improvements seen by patients returned to baseline once mavacamten was discontinued.
Read more about history of mavacamten and other investigational drugs for HCM by searching the HCMBeat archives on the home page.
DISCLOSURES: CYNTHIA BURSTEIN WALDMAN OF HCMBEAT SERVED AS A PATIENT ADVISOR ON THE STEERING COMMITTEE OF MYOKARDIA’S EXPLORER TRIAL AND IS CREDITED AS AN AUTHOR OF THE EXPLORER STUDY. until recently CYNTHIA also SERVED ON MYOKARDIA’S PATIENT ADVISORY BOARD.
CK-274 is a next-generation cardiac myosin inhibitor which the company hopes will prove to be beneficial for the treatment of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).
There are currently two companies in clinical trials for HCM: Cytokinetics and MyoKardia. You can read more about their efforts hereand here.
The researchers hope that the added resources from this grant will help them find ways to correct pathological heart protein changes they believe to be at the root of HCM. The team then plans to partner with pharmaceutical companies to develop more personalized approaches to HCM treatment.
Dr. Spudich has long been involved in HCM research and has been a founder of two separate companies which are currently engaged in drug trials for potential HCM treatments: MyoKardia and Cytokinetics.
A story about Dr. Spudich and the inspiration for his work was featured in this recent post on HCMBeat.
Unfortunately, this study which was conducted by Dr. Perry Elliott and his colleagues at University College London, found that trimetatazidine did not improve exercise capacity in these patients. Following the results of this study, trimetazidine will now join ranolazine and spironolactone in the compost heap of drugs which tried and failed to improve HCM symptoms. While a third drug, perhexiline, was found to improve symptoms for non-obstructive HCM, its limitations, including potentially serious side effects, stand in the way of its common usage.
EpiCor’s work with 5-azacytidine was declared the overall winner of the 2016 Venture Launch Accelerator Programme at Ireland’s University College Dublin where it won the 2016 Start-Up of the Year Award.
Addressing these findings, Associate Professor Joshua Stern, chief of the Cardiology Service at the University of California, Davis, veterinary hospital, stated:
Based on these positive results, U.C.Davis is hoping to conduct a clinical trial of MYK-461 to determine whether it could become the standard of care for cats with HCM.
It appears to be the end of the road for the Gilead drug eleclazine, a late sodium channel inhibitor previously known as GS-6615. Eleclazine, with properties similar to the anti-angina drug ranolazine (which was approved by the FDA in 2006), was the subject of a recently terminated HCM clinical trial known asLiberty-HCM. The HCM eleclazine study focused on whether the drug would improve symptoms and exercise capacity in patients with HCM by increasing their peak oxygen uptake, resulting in improved VO2 max readings on exercise testing. The HCM study began enrolling patients in February 2015. Data collection had been scheduled to continue through June 2017.Continue reading “End of the Road for Eleclazine and Liberty HCM Study”→
