Genexine, which had brought anxiety to investors because of sudden stepdown of CEO Kyung Han-soo경한수, announced the interim result of phase 2 clinical trial for its growth hormone GX-H9, raising expectations about technology transfer.
Genexine제넥신 had changed to the co-CEOs system of Seo You-seok 서유석 and Kyung Han-soo, but co-CEO Kyung stepped down on Aug. 31.
In the phase 2 trial, GX-H9 showed the similar result of a clinical trial with the U.S. company OPKO, which had transferred technology of growth hormone to Pfizer화이자.
Given OPKO transferred growth hormone that has the similar effectiveness of GX-H9 at $570 million in 2014, industry watchers expected the technology transfer of GX-H9 would also become a reality.
"Despite the favorable factor of presenting their results at an academic society, the stock price of Genexine didn’t rise much,” said Sun Min-jeong선민정, a researcher at Hana Financial Investment Monday. “But in the poster announcement, GX-H9 achieved the evaluations requirements of phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials,"
According to the announcement in the academy, the speed of height growth in a contrast group that got the injection of Genotropin every day was 10.8cm annually, but the group that the injection of 2.4mg/kg ‘GX-H9’ once every two weeks was about 12.3 cm.
Accordingly, Genexine said its product could be differentiated from the product with one injection a week made by OPKO.
"Until now, there weren’t serious side effects in clinical trials related to GX-H9. We confirmed the similar speed of height growth in six months of the trial compared with the speed for three months released in April," the company said.
"We confirmed similar growth speed in the contrast group. People who took the drug grew more than 10cm in height without a meaningful increase in side effects and could maintain the injection interval longer only with one injection every two weeks," the company added.
Genexine and Handok are developing GX-H9 and conducting phase 2 global trial for children who lack growth hormone.