Idorsia's Clozel says recruitment delay won't dent Fabry drug prospects

Idorsia's Clozel says recruitment delay won't dent Fabry drug prospects

ZURICH Reuters - Fledgling Swiss biotech Idorsia IDIA.S has suffered delays in recruiting patients for a key trial of its experimental lucerastat drug but that will not damage its commercial prospects, founder Jean-Paul Clozel told Reuters on Tuesday.

FILE PHOTO: Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical company Idorsia, attends an interview with Reuters at the company s headquarters in Allschwil near Basel, Switzerland May , . REUTERSArnd WiegmannFile Photo

Clozel - who owns % of Idorsia shares with his wife, Martine Clozel, the chief scientific officer - was speaking after the company reported third-quarter loss stabilized at million Swiss francs $. million amid spending on four late-stage drug programs.

Sluggish patient recruiting will push its lucerastat trial into , Clozel said, adding the delay allows Idorsia to trim its overall spending forecasts to no more than million francs on a GAAP basis, from million previously.

Lucerastat - which is being developed to treat Fabry disease - has orphan drug designation in the United States and the European Union, granting it incentives like years of market exclusivity should it win approval.

It is among four medicines in Phase III trials that Clozel hopes will help turn Idorsia into a “second Actelion”, the Swiss biotech company he sold to Johnson & Johnson JNJ.N in for $ billion.

“It’s not like we are losing with lucerastat very precious years of marketing,” Clozel said in a telephone interview. “Orphan drugs are protected, and the protection starts when the product is on the market.”

Idorsia shares fell .% by GMT but are up by nearly % this year.

Analysts from Bank Vontobel said “slight delays to the pipeline should not have any material effect as main product candidates are on track”.

Clozel said his top drug candidate, a medicine for insomnia tipped as a possible rival to Merck’s MRK.N Belsomra, remains on track to be filed for U.S. approval in amid ongoing studies.

“The sleep drug has a huge potential, certainly the largest of the drugs in terms of market potential that we have in phase III,” Clozel said.

Idorsia had cash reserves of million francs on Sept. , down from . billion at the start of year.

Clozel said he remains on the lookout for partners, among other financing options, to help him develop about a dozen drug projects underway at his laboratories in Allschwil, near Basel.

“Clearly, we will favor non-dilutive options,” he said. “It is true that we will need at one stage to find money to become, really, one of the two or three biggest biopharmaceutical companies in Europe. We are going very fast and of course we need to finance it.”

Reporting by John Miller and Paul Arnold in Zurich, editing by Deepa Babington

ISIS is reportedly using popular Gen Z app TikTok as its newest recruitment tool

Short-form video platform TikTok has removed two-dozen accounts for posting propaganda for the Islamic State, Georgia Wells at The Wall Street Journal reported.

Videos featuring ISIS fighters with guns, corpses, and Islamic State songs were posted to the app, according to the Journal. Some of the videos reportedly targeted potential future fighters, with shots glorifying militants set to ISIS songs. Others seemed to target young girls, reportedly using the term jihad lover, and women calling themselves jihadist and proud. The videos also used TikTok s in-app features, like filters and hearts.

Promoting terrorism is specifically banned under TikTok s community policy, which states that terrorist organizations and any other criminal organizations are banned from using TikTok. 

A TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider: Content promoting terrorist organizations has absolutely no place on TikTok. We permanently ban any such accounts and associated devices as soon as identified, and we continuously develop ever-stronger controls to proactively detect suspicious activity. This is an industry-wide challenge complicated by bad actors who actively seek to circumvent protective measures, but we have a team dedicated to aggressively protecting against malicious behavior on TikTok.

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The Islamic State has recruited members through social media since the group s infancy, which has caused trouble for other tech companies like as it tries to delete content that promotes violence, in accordance with its community standards. TikTok now has thousands of content moderators in China and the US, according to the Journal.

While other tech companies like have been criticized for not removing terrorist content — like footage from the Christchurch shooting — quickly enough, TikTok has reportedly been too quick to censor videos, especially those dealing with topics that might anger the Chinese government.

Earlier this month, TikTok hired a US law firm, including two former lawmakers, to help it revise content moderation policies. The Guardian reported in September on internal documents from Chinese parent company ByteDance instructing moderators to censor content about controversial topics likely to upset the Chinese government, like Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence. Sen. Marco Rubio has since asked the federal government to investigate the company for censoring content at China s request.

TikTok has wide reach as a propaganda tool. Parent company ByteDance is the highest-valued private company in the world, and in September, TikTok was the top free non-gaming app. One-third of the app s users are under , the Journal reported.