What happened
Investors in Ophthotech (ISEE), a clinical-stage biotech primarily focused on diseases of the eye, are having a brutal start to the trading week. Shares have utterly collapsed, falling by 84% as of 11:15 a.m. EST on Monday in response to disappointing results from two late-stage pivotal phase 3 trials.
So what
Ophthotech reported results from two phase 3 clinical trials, OPH1002 and OPH1003, on Monday. These trials were designed to test the company's experimental compound Fovista in combination with Novartis' (NVS -1.64%) Lucentis as a hopeful treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration, or wet AMD.
The combined analysis from the trials showed that patients who received Fovista and Lucentis in combination only demonstrated a mean gain of 10.24 letters on a standardized eye chart at 12 months. Unfortunately, that was only slightly better than the 10.01-letter gain observed in the patient group that only received Lucentis as a monotherapy. The small difference in outcomes was not shown to be statistically significant, which led the company to conclude that it sees no benefit to adding Fovista to a monthly Lucentis regimen in treating AMD.
Ophthotech CEO Dr. David Guyer said that the company was very disappointed with the news and that it plans to "continue to analyze the data from these two studies to better understand the trial results." Investors pummeled the stock on Monday in response to the news.