Concert Pharma craters as schizophrenia candidate flops

USA-based Concert Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: CNCE) saw its shares plunge as much as 40% yesterday, after it announced that its Phase II clinical trial to evaluate CTP-692 as an adjunctive treatment in patients with schizophrenia did not meet the primary endpoint or other secondary endpoints.

CTP-692, one of only two candidates in Concert’s pipeline, is a deuterated form of D-serine, an endogenous amino acid that is a co-agonist of the NMDA receptor. Concert closed the day with a 28.3% decline at $7.51.

“The body of evidence in the field supporting D-serine as an adjunctive treatment for schizophrenia was compelling and led us to advance CTP-692 into a Phase II proof of concept study. Unfortunately, we didn’t see the results we hoped for to support continuation of this program. Going forward, we will focus our internal resources on the advancement of CTP-543, which is currently in Phase III evaluation for the treatment of alopecia areata, and evaluation of additional pipeline candidates,” stated Roger Tung, president and chief executive of Concert Pharmaceuticals.