Opexa Therapeutics hopes its budget cuts will help fund future clinical trials.
+ Technology/Innovation
Jamie Barrand | Mar 6, 2016

Opexa's restructuring to include 30 percent workforce reduction

Researchers from all over the world are working on initiatives to find new treatments for autoimmune disorders.

To help achieve that goal, Woodland, Texas-based biopharmaceutical firm Opexa Therapeutics Inc. has revamped the ways its resources will be used going forward.

One part of the new plan is a 30 percent cut to Opexa's workforce; executives will be included in this reduction. Opexa's chief financial officer, Karthik Radhakrishnan, is among those who will leave the company.

Savings for the first quarter of this year are expected to be approximately $325,000.

Opexa officials hope the new initiatives will fund the company's programs into early 2017. The programs include research and development of multiple sclerosis (MS) and neuromyelitis optica (NMO) treatments that are tailored to individual patients.

Presently, Opexa researchers are near the end of a Phase IIb clinical trial for Abili-T, a therapy indicated for treatment of patients living with secondary progressive MS (SPMS). The team is almost ready to present top-line date from the study: this is expected to happen early in the last quarter of this year.

"We are focused on closing out the Phase IIb Abili-T study in secondary progressive multiple sclerosis patients and presenting top-line data early in the fourth quarter of this year," Opexa President and CEO Neil Warma said. "SPMS remains an area of critical unmet medical need, and the completion of the Abili-T study is an important step in the development of what we believe could be the first safe and effective treatment for this disease."

The trial is using as subjects 190 patients. The last dose of Abili-T was recently administered. 

"We achieved an important milestone last week, having administered the final dose to the last patient in the Abili-T trial, and to date we have completed approximately 97 percent of all patient visits," Warma said. "We have aligned the restructuring to coincide with the reduction of activities associated with nearing completion of the Abili-T trial. The restructuring should enable us to extend our current cash into the first quarter of 2017, providing us with additional runway beyond the expected Q4 2016 release of top-line data."

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