FibroGen provides additional information on roxadustat to the FDA relating to U.S. primary cardiovascular safety analyses

FibroGen, Inc. has provided clarification of certain prior disclosures of U.S. primary cardiovascular safety analyses from the roxadustat Phase III program for the treatment of anemia of chronic kidney disease (“CKD”).

“As members of senior management were preparing for the upcoming FDA Advisory Committee meeting, we became aware that the primary cardiovascular safety analyses included post-hoc changes to the stratification factors,” said Enrique Conterno, Chief Executive Officer, FibroGen. “While all of the analyses, including the differences in the stratification factors, were included in the NDA, we promptly decided to clarify this issue with the FDA and communicate with the scientific and investment communities.” Mr. Conterno continued, “It is important to emphasize that this does not impact our conclusion regarding the comparability, with respect to cardiovascular safety, of roxadustat to epoetin-alfa in dialysis-dependent (DD) patients and to placebo in non-dialysis dependent (NDD) patients. We continue to have confidence in roxadustat’s benefit risk profile.”

There is no change in the underlying roxadustat data, or to the efficacy analyses from the Phase III program. The Company has begun a comprehensive internal review to ensure such issues do not occur in the future.

As previously disclosed, the Company agreed with the FDA in the pre-NDA meeting that the primary analysis in non-dialysis would be ITT (intention to treat with long-term follow up) and in dialysis would be OT-7 (on-treatment plus 7 days). MACE, a composite endpoint of all-cause mortality, stroke, and myocardial infarction, was the primary safety endpoint agreed on with the FDA.

The analyses with the pre-specified stratification factors result in higher hazard ratios (point estimates of relative risk) and 95% confidence intervals. For MACE+ in dialysis and for MACE and MACE+ in incident dialysis, the 95% confidence intervals include 1.0. While these hazard ratios remain below 1.0, based on these analyses we cannot conclude that roxadustat reduces the risk of (or is superior to) MACE+ in dialysis, and MACE and MACE+ in incident dialysis compared to epoetin-alfa. These analyses do not change the Company’s assessment that roxadustat is comparable to placebo in non-dialysis dependent patients and to epoetin-alfa in dialysis dependent patients using MACE to measure cardiovascular safety.