Contineum Therapeutics reported a Phase 2 failure in multiple sclerosis on Thursday afternoon, but most analysts don’t seem to view the miss as catastrophic.
Contineum said its drug PIPE-307
did not reach
its primary or secondary endpoints in a trial looking at patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. The San Diego biotech did not report specific data and said it plans to release the full results at a future medical conference.
Contineum’s stock price
$CTNM
was down about 9% in Friday’s premarket session.
Analysts largely agreed, however, that the study was high-risk and unlikely to succeed. Contineum’s best bet for approval lies in another program called PIPE-791, which is being studied for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. A Phase 2 study is expected to launch by the end of this year.
“We continue to view the lion’s share of value for Contineum in the development of the company’s LPAR1 antagonist PIPE-791,” William Blair analyst Myles Minter wrote in a note to investors.
Contineum, formerly known as Pipeline Therapeutics, was
put together
by Versant Ventures in 2018 and
went public last year
with a $110 million IPO.
It’s partnered with Johnson & Johnson on PIPE-307, and the pair is also studying how well the drug works in major depression. A Phase 2 study is expected to read out in mid-2026. Minter wrote he doesn’t expect the multiple sclerosis failure to impact the depression readout, but it’s still a risky bet to succeed.
PIPE-307 is an M1 muscarinic receptor antagonist, targeting one of the same pathways used in the new schizophrenia drug Cobenfy from Bristol Myers Squibb and Karuna Therapeutics. While Cobenfy agonizes the M1 receptor (as well as the M4 receptor), PIPE-307 is designed to work in the opposite direction and inhibit its activity.