Monday RXi Pharmaceuticals (RXII) announced that the FDA is allowing  the company to begin a phase 1/2 trial for the retinal scarring of macular degeneration patients. This follows a 30-day IND review period where the FDA had the opportunity to review pre-clinical and toxicity data to determine if RXi's RXI-109 drug would be safe to give to humans for an eye treatment. 

This study will be known as RXI-109-1501 and will focus on patients with wet age-related macular degeneration, or Wet AMD. Current  treatments deal with the neovascularization of the disease -- leaking of the eye blood vessels -- but don't help with the scarring associated with the disease. 

RXI-109 will be used in these patients to determine if RXI-109 can inhibit the scarring in these patients eyes with macular degeneration. The good news is that because the company is already in phase 2a trials for skin scarring it won't have to run a single-dose phase 1 trial for RXI-109-1501. Instead the FDA will allow the company to start a multi-dose trial right away. 

The whole point of the trial of RXI-109-1501 is to determine if inhibiting scar growth in the eye for these Wet AMD patients allows them to preserve vision for longer periods of time. RXI-109 is a self-delivering RNAi -- sd-rxRNA -- compound that targets CTGF. The delivery platform is noted as self delivering because its can be delivered to any cell without a delivery vehicle.

In addition to this news the company will announce additional data for its phase 2a scar trial in mid-October of this year. 

After a stronger day yesterday, the stock managed to stay above the 40-cent level today before dropping a bit into the close along with many other stocks. It ended Tuesday down .025%.

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