Cassava Sciences is laying off 10 employees—a third of its workforce—as the biotech seeks to conserve cash in the wake of the phase 3 fail of its lead Alzheimer’s disease drug.
The RETHINK-ALZ trial compared simufilam, a small molecule that targets the filamin A protein, to placebo in more than 800 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. After 52 weeks, the changes from baseline on scales of cognitive and functional impairment—ADAS-COG12 and ADCS-ADL—were no better in the drug candidate cohort than in the placebo group, Cassava reported in November.
At the time, Cassava said it would review the data and evaluate the next steps. In a postmarket release Jan. 7, the company confirmed that it is in the process of discontinuing the phase 3 trial and analyzing both the 52-week and 76-week data sets with a view to sharing these more detailed results in the coming months.
In the meantime, Cassava said it is “continuing strategic expense efforts,” which will include the 10 redundancies during the first quarter of this year. The biotech, which entered 2025 with $128.6 million in the bank, is also halting a planned biomarker analysis of additional plasma samples from its previous phase 2 studies of simufilam in order to save money.
“Cassava continues to be dedicated to its mission of developing novel medicines for central nervous system disorders and enhancing shareholder value,” CEO Rick Barry said in yesterday’s release.
“We continue to carefully review the data from the RETHINK-ALZ study and plan to incorporate the results of the REFOCUS-ALZ study into our evaluation of next steps for Cassava,” Barry added. “With that in mind, following the announcement that the RETHINK-ALZ study did not meet its primary endpoints and that the REFOCUS-ALZ and Open Label Extension studies will be discontinued, we believe it is prudent to implement additional cost saving measures, including a reduction in force.”
Even before the phase 3 fail, the development of simufilam had garnered some unwanted attention, with Cassava agreeing in September 2024 to pay $40 million to resolve an investigation into claims it made misleading statements about phase 2b data earlier this year. In fact, the controversies go further back, with the journal PLOS One having retracted papers about the underlying science, which were published in 2008 and 2009.