Thomas Povsic, MD, PhD, on Addressing Unmet Needs in Refractory Angina With Gene Therapy
The interventional cardiologist and professor, Duke University School of Medicine, discussed how XC001 could improve outcomes for patients with refractory angina.
“The phase 1 study results, in general, suggested that there was a dose response with greater efficacy observed in patients in terms of a multitude of cardiac endpoints, including exercise time, ischemia imaging on PET scanning, angina episodes and CCSE inch in a class... We saw greater suggestion of benefit in patients who were enrolled in the top 2 dosing cohorts.”
XyloCor Therapeutics’ XC001 (encoberminogene rezmadenovec) gene therapy demonstrated clinical benefit in patients with refractory angina and well-tolerated in patients receiving epicardial delivery. Participantsin the phase 1/2 EXACT clinical trial (NCT04125732) showed improvements in total exercise duration and reductions in ischemic burden and ischemic symptoms, according to updated data.
CGTLive spoke with principal investigator Thomas Povsic, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, cardiology, Duke University School of Medicine, to learn more about the treatment landscape for patients with refractory angina and unmet needs that remain. He stressed that this population of patients often still live long lives, but of poor quality and with high rates of depression due to their limited lifestyles and pain. He discussed the preliminary positive safety and dose-dependent responses seen in the trial and shared his belief that SC001 could improve outcomes for patients with refractory angina. He also talked about the gene therapy’s unique characteristic of expressing all 3 major isoforms of vascular endothelial growth factor, which was shown to result in greater angiogenesis and improved safety in preclinical studies.
