How it started
History
In December 2014, Axovant acquired rights to the drug intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline. Intepirdine is a potential add-on treatment to donepezil for patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with dementia with Lewy bodies. GlaxoSmithKline had sold the rights to Axovant for only $5 million, a very small amount in the pharmaceutical industry, because four clinical trials had resulted in failure. Intepirdine was Axovant's only product.
Although no clinical development took place, Axovant held its IPO in June 2015 and raised $315 million, the largest biotech IPO ever, based on new phase IIB trials that were more promising. The lock-up period against reselling stock was reduced to an unusually short 90 days for hedge funds that showed interest in the IPO.
In July 2017, Axovant announced that the results of a phase III trial indicated that the drug was not effective for treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Since investors noticed Axovant could not release the product, its stock lost 75 percent of its value in a single day. Because of this incident, the company has been accused of developing a pump-and-dump scheme.
The company also entered clinical trials for dementia with Lewy bodies, which were unsuccessful as well. Consequently, Axovant announced in 2018 that it has discontinued development of intepirdine.
As of 2016 Axovant was also developing a second compound, nelotanserin. Axovant acquired global rights to nelotanserin from its former parent, Roivant, which had previously bought those rights from Arena Pharmaceuticals and intended to develop it as a treatment for Lewy body dementia. However, in late 2018, the company announced that nelotanserin failed to meet its primary endpoint of reducing the frequency of REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) episodes in a small Phase 2 clinical trial for the treatment of RBD in LBD patients and that therefore its development would be discontinued.
From Wikipedia’s article on Axovant Sciences, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2