Right on time, the FDA approved Celgene Corp.’s phosphodieasterase-4 inhibitor Otezla (apremilast) for adults with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA), a drug that could sell in the range of $1.5 billion to $2 billion by 2017, the company said.
Wall Street hailed Endocyte Inc.’s double play – a positive opinion from European regulators on vintafolide in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer (PROC) and good news from a phase IIb trial in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with the same compound – by sending its stock through the roof.
Akebia Therapeutics Inc. beat the target amount raised in its initial public offering to raise about $100 million, and started off trading with a bang, closing Thursday (NASDAQ:AKBA) at $26.70, up 57 percent.
Still enrolling a pivotal trial of its own Factor Xa inhibitor betrixaban, Portola Pharmaceuticals Inc. launched a new phase III study, this one testing andexanet alfa, designed to reverse the action of the anticoagulant class.
Medivation Inc. and partner Astellas Pharma Inc. made the latest move in the battle for prostate cancer marketing share by submitting a supplemental new drug application (sNDA) seeking a label for Xtandi (enzalutamide) in chemotherapy-naïve men.
Five Prime Therapeutics Inc. is getting $20 million up front, selling a premium-priced equity stake, and “learning from the masters, as it were,” in its three-year cancer immunotherapy deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMS), an agreement centered on two undisclosed pathways that could generate a couple of targets each, said Five Prime CEO Lewis Williams.
Already trading weakly as a public entity thanks to its reverse merger in the fall of last year, Ignyta Inc. priced an initial public offering (IPO) of about 5.2 million shares at $9.15 each, for gross proceeds of about $48 million and a net haul of about $44.5 million.
Anaptysbio Inc.’s SHM-XEL antibody-making platform that replicates somatic hypermutation in vitro drew yet another partner, this time Tesaro Inc., which agreed to pay $17 million up front for rights to three cancer antibody programs and could fork over as much as $108 million per target as Tesaro makes progress beyond the preclinical stage with each.
While Geron Corp. awaits formal notification by letter from the FDA regarding the full clinical hold placed on imetelstat, shares crashed and investors had few answers to their questions about the surprising move.
The higher-dose glitch in otherwise strong phase II results with its galectin-3-targeting chronic kidney disease (CKD) therapy did little to hold back shares of La Jolla Pharmaceutical Co. (NASDAQ:LJPC), which closed Tuesday at $17.96, up $7.06, or 64.8 percent.
