BioCryst Pharmaceuticals CEO Jon Stonehouse got a jump on Memorial Day weekend travel. Today, Stonehouse is in London where he will tell European doctors and healthcare professionals how BioCryst’s experimental gout drug can pair with a nearly 50-year-old gout treatment and make it work significantly better.
Stonehouse is presenting at the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology where he will discuss Durham, North Carolina-based BioCryst’s (NASDAQ:BCRX) gout treatment BCX4208. What he probably won’t touch on with this crowd is how that compound fits into BioCryst’s overall strategy of drug partnering. The drug candidate is still in mid-stage clinical trials. But the compound is now included in a $5 million pipeline infusion for the company to conduct additional research. A closer look at BioCryst’s pipeline gives insight into the company’s strategy that determines which drugs it plans to develop in-house and those it will instead choose to develop with a partner.
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BCX4208 is a partner candidate. Most gout patients are treated with allopurinol. Available in the United States since 1964, the drug works by reducing the production of uric acid that leads to inflammation and joint pain characteristic of the disease. But only 40 percent of patients respond to allopurinol. BioCryst’s clinical data show that when BCX4208 is combined with allopurinol, the response rate doubles to 80 percent.
“If most patients on this 50-year-old drug don’t get to goal, and you add BCX4208 and you double the number of patients, that’s a big impact,” Stonehouse said in an interview before his London trip.
New data gleaned from additional studies will better prepare the compound for an evaluation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, while also making a stronger case to present to potential partners. Gout affects 8.3 million U.S. patients. Gout is also a chronic condition, so BCX4208 could give a pharma company a drug with recurring revenue.
BioCryst will also seek a partner for BCX5191, a preclinical compound being developed to treat hepatitis C. The disease affects an estimated 170 million people worldwide. The large number of patients means the drug will require a large clinical trial. Stonehouse said it makes more sense for BioCryst to partner with a large pharmaceutical company that has the resources to finance those studies on BCX5191.
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But another preclinical candidate is likely to remain in-house. BCX4161 is being developed to treat hereditary angioedema, a rare genetic condition that results in swelling in the face and airways that can lead to suffocation. Just 6,000 U.S. patients have the disease and BCX4161 is a candidate to be an orphan drug. Stonehouse said that because of the small patient population, trials on BCX4161 would be smaller and more affordable for BioCryst.
Meanwhile, Stonehouse notes that BioCryst’s in-house drug discovery efforts are continuing. Those efforts produced BCX5191 and are expected to yield a slate of candidates to follow the compounds that have moved along the pipeline. In that sense, BioCryst is avoiding the decline in discovery and R&D efforts characteristic of many of the large pharmaceutical companies. It’s their empty drug pipelines that give BioCryst and many other smaller pharmaceutical companies opportunities to test and commercialize new drugs.
The first commercialized BioCryst drug we’re likely to see is peramivir, the company’s experimental flu treatment that was available briefly when the FDA granted temporary authorization during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Peramivir is in phase 3 clinical trials that are being funded by an additional $55 million awarded to BioCryst from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. BioCryst can’t turn to federal contracts to finance clinical studies on all of its compounds. If BioCryst’s strategy plays out according to Stonehouse’s plan, it won’t have to.
