Biotech runs on the future tense, and at BIO last month, one company after another told you the date of its next milestone, not the answer it would bring. The back half of the year is when the tense catches up with them, from obesity data already unblinded to a CAR-T filing that should close out the fourth quarter.
Five names, five clocks, none of them synced. One of them is already ringing.
Aphaia's Obesity Read, And The Case For Losing Less
Aphaia Pharma is first to the line. At BIO, the Zug, Switzerland company told Scrip that Phase II results for APHD-012, its obesity candidate, would be unblinded in early July, with a public readout to follow soon after. That unblinding has now passed, so Aphaia's is the first of these results due. The interesting part isn't the size of the number it might post. It's the premise.
APHD-012 is a proprietary glucose product taken as beads, twice a day. The beads activate nutrient-sensing cells in the lower small intestine, prompting the gut to release its own satiety hormones: GLP-1, along with PYY, glicentin and oxyntomodulin. Where injectable incretin drugs flood the system from outside, Aphaia is trying to coax it from within. Steffen-Sebastian Bolz, Aphaia's chief scientific officer, put the contrast plainly: forcing rapid, maximal weight loss "override[s] a system that will mercilessly fight back because we're not made to lose that much weight." The pitch is durability rather than magnitude, a loss the body doesn't spend the next year clawing back. In an earlier study, Bolz said, patients kept the weight off and shed a little more in the weeks after they stopped.