Eliem Therapeutics feels more pain

The difficulty of finding pain medications beyond troublesome opioids has been demonstrated again with the second, and final, failure of Eliem Therapeutics’ prodrug ETX-810. Today Eliem said it would halt all future development after ETX-810 bombed in a phase 2a sciatica trial, failing to beat placebo in reducing pain from baseline at four weeks. In April the group saw its shares more than halve when ETX-810 failed in diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain. Today, Eliem’s stock was down 11%, contributing to an 80% dip since the company's float less than a year ago. With ETX-810 out of the picture Eliem will pivot to ETX-155, its Gaba A modulator for major depressive disorder; a phase 2a trial is scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2023. On the upside the relatively swift termination of ETX-810 should allow the money Eliem raised at IPO to extend beyond mid-2024, and fund initial ETX-155 trials, but as Acadia Pharmaceuticals and others have found MDD is also a tough nut to crack; Sage Therapeutics is also much further along with its rival Gaba A project zuranolone, so with nothing else of note left in the pipeline this will be make or break time for Eliem.