AC Immune’s stock price has jumped by more than 20% after all patients in a trial of its Parkinson’s disease vaccine-like immunotherapy responded to the target antigen.
On Thursday (14 November), the Switzerland-based pharma company saw its stock rise by 26.9% from market close on 13 November to the 14 November high. The stock rose following the announcement of positive interim data from the Phase II (NCT06015841) VacSYn trial of its anti-alpha-synuclein (a-syn) active immunotherapy candidate ACI-7104.056.
Not only did the data show positive antibody responses against the target antigen at six weeks, but the responses were strongly boostable. a-syn is believed to be a key protein in the disease due to its high prevalence in patients with Parkinson's disease.
Treatment with ACI-7104.056 induced an increase in anti-a-syn antibodies on average 16-fold higher than the placebo background level after three immunisations.
CEO of AC Immune, Dr. Andrea Pfeifer, said: “The level of immunogenicity after only three months of treatment as well as the continued positive safety profile, reinforces the best-in-class characteristics of our clinically validated anti-a-syn active immunotherapy for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.”
VacSYn is an adaptive, placebo-controlled, and biomarker-based Phase II study in patients with early Parkinson’s disease, consisting of two parts with a seamless transition. Part 1 includes initial analyses from over 30 patients randomised to receive ACI-7104.56 or placebo at a ratio of 3:1. To date, no adverse events (AEs) have been reported other than transient injection site reactions (49%) and headaches (18%).
AC Immune plans to release further interim results in H1 2025 including pharmacodynamic data, after which it plans to initiate Part 2 of VacSYn with up to 150 patients. Patients in Part 2 will be evaluated for the progression of motor and non-motor symptoms of the disease, as well as digital, imaging, and fluid biomarkers.
After the second part of the study, the Swiss company hopes the data will support progression to a pivotal study.
According to GlobalData’s drug database, there are 93 pipeline products in Phase I to Phase III development within the 7MM for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Therapies targeting a-syn aggregation account for 26% of the pipeline disease-modifying therapies (DMTs).
GlobalData is the parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology.
At the AD/PD conference in March 2024, Vaxxinity announced positive data from a Phase I trial of its a-syn vaccine-like therapy, UB-312.
