Dive Brief:
- An experimental eczema shot from Nektar Therapeutics helped trial enrollees who’d already benefited from treatment maintain and even deepen their response over one year after being switched to a longer-lasting maintenance dose, the company said Tuesday.
- The data, if confirmed in additional testing, could give Nektar’s shot a competitive advantage over Regeneron and Sanofi’s Dupixent and Eli Lilly’s Ebglyss by offering deepening effects with less-frequent dosing. But Nektar also faces competition from many others advancing different types of injectables and oral medicines for the condition.
- Nektar is planning a Phase 3 trial with a similar design that will allow responders to transition to a maintenance dose while others continue on with the initial regimen. If successful, the company expects to ask the Food and Drug Administration for approval in 2029.
Dive Insight:
Nektar shares were worth less than $10 apiece only a few years ago, when efforts to develop a cancer immunotherapy with Bristol Myers Squibb fell short. But shares have rebounded considerably since the middle of 2025. And they climbed as much as 48% in morning trading, nudging the valuation of the 36-year-old company over the $1 billion mark as investors gained confidence in the potential of its drug, called rezpegaldesleukin.
The drug targets IL-2, a protein that stimulates a type of white blood cell that helps keeps erroneous immune responses in check. Nektar is testing the approach — a common strategy against cancer — in multiple autoimmune conditions, including eczema, alopecia areata and Type 1 diabetes.
The data Nektar announced Tuesday came from the second part of a trial in eczema that was already declared a success. In the first stage of that trial, Nektar was able to show that a significantly greater share of people who received rezpegaldesleukin instead of a placebo achieved certain measures of skin clearance. That measurement was taken after trial enrollees had received different doses of rezpegaldesleukin either fortnightly or monthly.
In the study’s second phase, 167 of the 320 participants who got Nektar’s drug and achieved a specific level of skin clearance — “EASI50” or greater — were then given additional treatment at different dose intervals over 36 weeks. Most of those regimens involved less frequent dosing than what patients received at the study’s start.
Additionally, 23 people in the placebo arm who achieved EASI50 continued getting a placebo. Placebo and drug recipients who didn’t hit that mark were allowed into a “rescue arm” of the trial that got rezpegaldesleukin treatment.
Nektar said the majority of people who entered the second stage maintained their response, as measured by the EASI scale, a separate assessment and a measurement of itching. A “meaningful proportion” of those in the second stage saw an even deeper response — such as meeting more strict measures of skin clearance than they’d achieved in the initial part of the trial.
In a note to clients Tuesday, Jefferies analyst Roger Song wrote that the new data “exceeded our expectations” and surpassed benchmarks set by other therapies.
