Wave Life Sciences Ltd. (WVE) stock recently traded at $7.09 which is a 3.54% downward movement. The WVE stock previously closed at $7.35. It also plunged by 25.39%in the pre-market trading session at the time of writing.

What caused the downward movement?

The recent downward movement in WVE stock comes adjacent to the announcement by the clinical-stage company reporting that one of their genetic treatment programs has failed.

Glimpse into WVE stock’s operational background

Wave Life Sciences (WVE) is a clinical-stage medicines company that specifically focuses on genetics. Genetic medicines are aimed to provide treatment to patients that are ill with life-threatening diseases. WVE stock has a platform known as PRISM which is used for the development of drugs specifically related to oligonucleotides. These stereo pure oligonucleotides are analyzed, designed, optimized, and produced under the proprietary work on the PRISM platform. This will allow for the production of highly effective medicine among the therapeutic modalities that can target a broad range of genetically incurring diseases.

What’s the news on the current Huntington disease-related program?

One of the pipeline programs that Wave Life Sciences (WVE) focused on is the antisense oligonucleotide program. This was used to monitor the early-stage Huntington disease and the potential progress of two experimental drug candidates. The experimental drugs were known as WVE-120102 and WVE-120101. The latter drug was completed with dosing in the 32 mg cohort of the PRECISION-HD1 core trial. WVE stock announced that their study showed that WVE-120101 had little effect on reducing mutant Huntington protein during a dosing-period 8.1 monthly. For CSF, it had a non-statistically significant median reduction of 11.6% in mHTT compared to the pooled placebo group of 10%.

The WVE-120102 similarly showed a non-statistically median reduction of 9.9% in mHTT compared to the pooled placebo group that had a median decrease in mHTT of 0.8%.

Both experimental drug candidates failed to differentiate significantly the response from the placebo group and thus the effectiveness of the drug dosage to incur a response on mutant Huntington protein was menial. Each drug program will have a final follow-up visit for its test-subjects but there will be further administration of dosages as no observed changes in NfL and wtHTT were made.

What’s next for the company?

Wave Life Sciences Ltd. (WVE) along with the news of discontinuation of WVE-120101 and WVE-120102 has announced a focus on the development of the new clinical-trial program on its PRISM platform. The new program focuses on the experimental drugs WVE -003 and WVE-004.

WVE-003 will be administered in Phase 1b/2a trial for which site activation and enrollment is being carried out. WVE-004 is still in the initial process of testing out the impact on key biomarkers and the safety of this drug.

Clinical-stage healthcare companies always have numerous programs in their pipeline. Often these pipeline projects fail to produce the necessary and expected result in their trial-phases. This is why it is important for investors interested in biopharmaceutical and healthcare stocks to watch out for relevant news related to the progress or discontinuation of experimental treatment programs. Such news can significantly impact the movement of the stock and project the company’s overall outlook.