Cassava shoots up on trial results of Alzheimer's candidate

9 December 2019

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US biotech Cassava Sciences (Nasdaq: SAVA), previously known as Pain Therapeutics, was up 41% premarket on Friday on increased volume in reaction to new data from a Phase IIa clinical trial evaluating lead drug, PTI-125, in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD). The results were presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer's Disease Conference in San Diego.

Consistent with over 10 years of basic research and pre-clinical data, the new data show clinical evidence of PTI-125’s mechanism of action and drug-target engagement, including:

Improvements in biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease in plasma and lymphocytes;
Consistency across biomarker improvements in CSF, plasma, and lymphocytes;
Significant reductions (p<0.01) in both nitrated and phosphorylated forms of tau protein;
Evidence that each individual patient showed biomarker responses to PTI-125;
Evidence that PTI-125 reversed the shape of altered filamin A in lymphocytes;
Early clinical validation of the drug target – altered filamin A – as a facilitator protein between amyloid beta and both neuroinflammation and tau pathology.

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