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CoLucid announced it closed a $25M series B financing. The main phase 2, development compound is COL-144 (5-HT1F agonist for the treatment of migraine), a drug they in-licensed from Eli Lilly after it completed phase 1 trials.
While the $25M series B headline immediately caught my eye, it didn’t take much more reading to find something that annoyed me.
CoLucid refers to COL-144 as first-in-class, Neurally Acting Anti-Migraine Agent (or NAAMA). Well, isn’t that cute. Neurally acting?? Where else would it work, the spleen? the femur? If there’s one thing I won’t stand for, it’s a completely useless acronym.
The other thing that immediately caught my eye was that the phase 2 trial was dosed IV, while the drug is presumably going to be marketed orally. There must have been a reason for the IV dosing. Maybe there was a small formulary issue but perhaps there is a more sinister problem afoot.
Eli Lilly has had at least three 5-HT1F agonist programs and one actually almost made it to phase 3 trials (LY334370 successfully completed three phase 2’s). All the programs have seemingly been discontinued with no explanation or publication of negative results. I don’t think it would be unreasonable, since COL-144 may use a similar scaffold to one of the failed programs, that there are inherent PK, PD or toxicology issues.
My blatant speculation aside, 4 venture firms have so far dumped $41.5M into CoLucid in just around three years. If the company manges to get this delivery issue worked out and they show comparable efficacy to the new generic sumatriptan (Imitrex), I’m sure a beefy buyout is in the future.
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Eben is a highly caffeinated business development associate at a small, cash sensitive pharmaceutical company somewhere in Massachusetts. He enjoys cliche-less banter, compartmentalization, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and NPV analysis. Agree or disagree with what he's posted? He encourages comments.
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