Private startup Sorriso Pharmaceuticals laid out Phase 1b data at a medical conference last weekend as part of its effort to bring an oral antibody to market for IBD patients.
The results come after Sorriso
toplined a readout
in December from the small, 22-patient trial in ulcerative colitis that lasted six weeks, but didn’t release specifics. At the time, CEO Ciara Kennedy said the data were strong enough to move into a 200-patient Phase 2 study where researchers could obtain more answers about the drug’s effectiveness.
Getting an oral antibody to market would be a significant feat for Sorriso. IBD is a massive patient population and most drugs are systemic treatments, administered through IV infusions or injections, that come with uncomfortable side effects. Previous attempts at developing orals have largely failed due to a focus on monoclonal antibodies.
Sorriso’s drug, called SOR102, is an oral bispecific targeting TNF-alpha and IL-23. The compound contains a specialized amino acid linker designed to cleave when exposed to trypsin, which is one of the enzymes that pervades the digestive tract.
In Sorriso’s Phase 1b study, six patients received placebo, seven received 810 mg of SOR102 once per day, and nine received 810 mg twice per day. The primary endpoint was safety, but Sorriso looked at a number of efficacy measurements including endoscopic response — part of the traditional primary endpoint in mid- and late-stage UC studies that’s measured by biopsy.
“It’s a good proxy for clinical remission, because clinical remission includes endoscopic response,” Kennedy said.
Two of the nine individuals in the twice-daily cohort saw an endoscopic response, while none of those in the once-daily arm did. But those figures come with a caveat: Five of the patients taking the drug dropped out of the trial, four of whom were in the twice-daily arm — though only one was due to the treatment itself.
Three patients had UC that was too severe to be treated, and the fourth moved shortly after starting the study, Kennedy said. Sorriso assumed none of them responded to SOR102 in their reported data, because they weren’t able to biopsy those patients. All of the patients in the study were recruited in Ukraine and the country of Georgia.
As a result, Sorriso was left with two of five patients (40%) responding in the twice-daily “per protocol” population. The entire population’s 22% response rate is “very comparable to monotherapies, and the protocol population, 40%, is much above the response rate that you see in monotherapies,” Kennedy said.
The company is still trying to finalize the Phase 2 trial design. Right now, the plan is to enroll 200 patients randomized across four arms: placebo and three twice-daily drug arms. The amount used in the Phase 1b high-dose arm is expected to be the middle “anchor” cohort, Kennedy said.
The Phase 2 study will also run on a similar timeframe to most IBD studies, starting patients in a 12-week induction phase and then monitoring them out to a year in a maintenance phase.
Sorriso is aiming to improve its manufacturing capabilities to make the drug easier for patients to take. In the Phase 1b study, patients were taking as many as 12 pills per day — six in the morning, and six in the evening. But researchers have already managed to whittle that down to six for Phase 2, with the goal of reducing it even further.
“In Phase 1, our drug product was 135 milligrams per capsule. Now we’re in about the 300 milligrams per capsule range,” Kennedy said. “But for Phase 3, we’re looking at formulations where perhaps we move to a single compressed tablet, where we could deliver 800 mg in one tablet.”
Kennedy also added that the company is on track to close its Series B round in the middle of this year. “We are in multiple discussions with a lot of different investors,” she said. It raised a $31 million
Series A
in 2021.