Vi­a­tris said Fri­day its treat­ment can­di­date for a com­mon form of eye in­flam­ma­tion failed a late-stage tri­al, cast­ing un­cer­tain­ty on the pro­gram’s fu­ture.

The biotech’s pime­crolimus 0.3% oint­ment did not meet the Phase 3 pri­ma­ry end­point of “com­plete res­o­lu­tion of de­bris” at six weeks ver­sus ve­hi­cle, ac­cord­ing to a re­lease. The tri­al en­rolled 477 pa­tients with ble­phar­i­tis, a con­di­tion that in­volves in­flam­ma­tion at the edges of the eye­lids. Ble­phar­i­tis caus­es swelling, itch­ing and crust­ing of the skin near the eye­lids.

Vi­a­tris Chief R&D Of­fi­cer Philippe Mar­tin said in the re­lease that the com­pa­ny is “eval­u­at­ing the ap­pro­pri­ate next steps” for the pro­gram, in­clud­ing po­ten­tial­ly “re­vis­ing” an­oth­er Phase 3 tri­al of pime­crolimus that it had been plan­ning.

Its stock VTRS fell about 3% at mar­ket open Fri­day.

In the wide world of tra­di­tion­al­ly un­drug­gable pro­teins, one group stands out as the trick­i­est to catch. These squig­gly mol­e­cules seem to have no sta­ble struc­ture, and their squirmi­ness makes cap­tur­ing a prop­er mol­e­c­u­lar pic­ture of them, let alone grab­bing hold of them with a drug, close to im­pos­si­ble.

That was un­til David Bak­er set his sights on them. “I think we've kind of solved that prob­lem,” he told End­points News.

Bak­er, who won the No­bel Prize in Chem­istry last year for his work de­sign­ing pro­teins with com­put­ers and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, has re­vealed two new strate­gies that use AI to de­vel­op ar­ti­fi­cial pro­teins that bind to the so-called in­trin­si­cal­ly dis­or­dered pro­teins (IDPs) or sim­i­lar­ly slip­pery seg­ments called in­trin­si­cal­ly dis­or­dered re­gions (IDRs).

KI­GALI, RWAN­DA — Emo­tions ran high this week at one of the world’s lead­ing HIV sci­ence con­fer­ences af­ter months of adapt­ing in re­al-time to fund­ing pull­backs that have shut­tered or stalled crit­i­cal HIV pro­grams.

The fi­nan­cial loss­es and un­cer­tain­ty came up dur­ing many of the ses­sions at the In­ter­na­tion­al AIDS So­ci­ety (IAS) Con­fer­ence on HIV Sci­ence in the cap­i­tal of Rwan­da.

But many at­ten­dees al­so ex­pressed hope, as they've done for four decades of ad­vance­ments and set­backs in HIV med­i­cine, cit­ing the FDA's re­cent ap­proval of Gilead­'s Yez­tu­go, the first twice-year­ly HIV PrEP, and Mer­ck­'s once-month­ly pre­ven­tion pill mov­ing in­to late-stage test­ing.

Re­searchers, health­care providers and oth­er at­ten­dees were smil­ing as they ran in­to col­leagues they rarely see in per­son.

More on-the-ground take­aways from the meet­ing in Ki­gali: