The end looms for Syros

Three months after Syros’s lead project tamibarotene flunked a mid-stage study in acute myeloid leukaemia, it has stumbled again, this time in myelodysplastic syndrome. The group said after hours on Tuesday that the Select-MDS study, in first-line high-risk patients with RARA gene overexpression, hadn’t met its primary endpoint of complete response rate. Tamibarotene, a retinoic acid receptor alpha (RARα) agonist, was being tested in combination with azacitidine. Syros’s future now looks dim, especially as the company said the trial's failure constituted a default on its loan with Oxford Finance LLC. Syros, which had $58m in cash at the last count, was worth just $73m even before the latest news, giving it little chance of raising more money, and its stock sank 80% premarket on Wednesday. Syros’s pipeline is also bare: its website lists SY-2101, an oral formulation of arsenic trioxide, and the CDK7 inhibitor SY-5609, but these were deprioritised in 2023 so Syros could focus on tamibarotene. There are no other RARα agonists in active development, according to OncologyPipeline, but CDK7 is a more active area of research, with six assets in the clinic.

Tamibarotene trials

Source: OncologyPipeline & company releases.