Novartis has suffered its third clinical trial setback in a week after its drug del-desiran failed a late-stage study in muscle disorder patients.

This is a significant blow for the company. Del-desiran was central to Novartis’s 12 billion dollar acquisition of Avidity Biosciences and had been viewed internally as a likely blockbuster drug.

In fact, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan had told Bloomberg TV back in July that the drug carried potential peak sales of over 5 billion dollars, and that a successful trial would make it the first drug ever shown to work in this specific condition.

That success didn’t materialise. Novartis said on Tuesday, 8 September, that patients treated with del-desiran did not show a statistically meaningful improvement in how quickly they could open their hands, compared to patients given a placebo.

This was the key measure the trial was designed to test.

The company says it will now go through the complete trial data and consult with health regulators before deciding what comes next for the drug’s development. This isn’t an isolated event either.

Just in the past week, Novartis also paused trials for an experimental cell therapy targeting autoimmune diseases after three patients died during the study.

On top of that, another drug in its pipeline, a heart medicine called pelacarsen, also failed in a separate closely watched trial. There was one bright spot though.

Novartis did report positive results from a different trial testing an experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis during the same week, offering at least some relief amid the broader run of setbacks.

Del-desiran was one of three antibody oligonucleotide therapies that came into Novartis’s pipeline through the Avidity acquisition, and this failure has raised fresh questions about how the rest of that pipeline might perform going forward.

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