Soligenix Inc (NASDAQ:SNGX) shares rose 5.2% on Thursday after the company released positive findings from a Phase 2a clinical study evaluating SGX945 for the treatment of oral ulcers associated with Behçet’s Disease.
The biopharmaceutical company reported that seven of the eight patients enrolled in the study experienced meaningful clinical benefits during the four-week treatment phase. Importantly, the improvements persisted throughout a subsequent four-week follow-up period after therapy had ended, pointing to a potentially durable treatment effect.
Results published in Rheumatology (Oxford) showed that SGX945 achieved a 40% improvement in the area-under-the-curve metric compared with placebo, benchmarked against data from a separate Phase 3 trial of apremilast. While SGX945 dosing stopped at Week 4, a substantial benefit was maintained through Week 8, with a reported improvement of 32%.
Soligenix noted that many currently available treatments for Behçet’s Disease—including apremilast, marketed as Otezla—require continuous dosing due to a lack of sustained efficacy. In contrast, SGX945 was well tolerated in the study, with no treatment-related adverse events reported. By comparison, apremilast is commonly associated with side effects such as diarrhea, nausea and headaches.
Building on the results, Soligenix said it intends to reformulate SGX945 to support at-home administration via subcutaneous injection. Behçet’s Disease is estimated to affect up to 18,000 patients in the United States, around 50,000 in Europe and as many as one million people globally, underscoring the significant unmet need for effective and durable treatment options.