Dec 19 (Reuters) – Altimmune said on Friday its experimental liver disease drug improved signs of scarring and health of the organ after 48 weeks of treatment in a mid-stage study, sending the company’s shares up more than 15% in premarket trading.
The company is developing the drug, pemvidutide, to potentially treat metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis or MASH — a serious liver disease that develops when fat buildup causes inflammation of the organ.
It belongs to the same class of drugs as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic, and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound, known as GLP-1 agonists, and is being studied separately as an obesity treatment.
Altimmune said 212 patients who were on two once-weekly doses of pemvidutide led to improvements on blood and scan-based tests, which are used to track liver scarring and stiffness, and that these improvements were larger than those seen at 24 weeks.
People on the higher dose of 1.8mg lost an average of 7.5% of their body weight at 48 weeks, with no evidence of plateauing, compared with 0.2% in placebo.
(Reporting by Padmanabhan Ananthan in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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