Can't Keep Quiet About This

Perhaps lost in the headlines about Emphasys Medical Inc. filing to raise up to $86.3 million in an IPO is the important fact that this company, the leader in the race to develop the first interventional treatment for emphysema, this month submitted the results of VENT, its 321-patient pivotal trial, to the Food and Drug Administration.

It’s all there in the S-1.

VENT, which stands for Bronchial Valve for Emphysema PalliatioN Trial, was a randomized clinical trial conducted at 31 centers in U.S. Its goal was to demonstrate the clinical benefits and safety of the Emphasys Bronchial Valve.

According to Emphasys’ S-1, the treatment group got EBV treatment in one lung along with optimal medical management including pulmonary rehabilitation. The control group received only optimal medical management treatment and pulmonary rehabilitation.

The endpoints were (drawing from the S-1):

Physiologic Improvement: FEV1, a co-primary endpoint of the study, measures the volume of air forcefully exhaled by a patient over time.

Exercise Tolerance: A patient’s exercise tolerance is used as a proxy for the patient’s ability to function on a daily basis. VENT used two tests of exercise tolerance. A co-primary endpoint of the study was 6MWT, which measures the distance a patient can walk in six minutes. Cycle ergometry, one of the secondary endpoints in VENT, measures the maximum workload exerted by a patient on a stationary bicycle.

Quality of Life: VENT used a standard, pulmonary-disease-specific questionnaire called the St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire, or SGRQ, as a secondary endpoint in the study. Patients answered questions related to frequency and severity of symptoms, activities that cause or are limited by breathlessness, the impact the disease has on social functioning and any attendant psychological disturbances resulting from the disease.

Breathlessness: VENT used a standard questionnaire called the modified Medical Research Council Dyspnea Scale, or mMRC, as a secondary endpoint. The mMRC asked patients to report on when they experience breathlessness and what causes it.

Oxygen Consumption. Many patients utilize supplemental oxygen to reduce breathlessness. In the VENT trial, patients reported how much oxygen they consumed on a daily basis.

And the results, according to the S-1, are……:

The patients treated with the EBV in the VENT study demonstrated statistically significant improvements, measured by meeting a p-value equal to or less than 0.025, in both of the co-primary efficacy endpoints, FEV1 and 6MWT, as well as in three of the four secondary endpoints.

FEV1 showed a 6.4% difference relative to the control at a p-value of 0.0047, and the 6MWT demonstrated 5.6% improvement relative to the control at a p-value of 0.0073. We demonstrated improvement in all four secondary endpoints, with the improvement in three of these endpoints, cycle ergometry, quality of life and breathlessness, meeting the hurdle for statistical significance.

As for safety, the primary safety endpoint was a major complications composite at 180 days. The composite included death, respiratory failure, pneumonia distal to the valves, massive hemotysis, prolonged pneumothoraces and empyema.

At the six-month follow-up, the treatment arm MCC rate was 5.9% compared to 1.0% for the control arm, and from six months to one year, the treatment arm MCC rate was 4.5% compared to 4.0% for the control arm.

There's plenty more in there so we encourage you to take a look.

The IN VIVO blog didn't even try to reach Emphasys executives or investors for comment. It is, after all, quiet period time. But the action of filing for an IPO without having heard from the FDA says enough about their confidence in the results. It'll be interesting to see whether final word from the FDA will be needed for this IPO to happen.

But a happy ending to both sagas will be good news for patients, interventional pulmonologists and investors in companies developing devices to treat lung disease. IN VIVO, the magazine, will be profiling another significant player in this area, Asthmatx Inc., in our next issue.