Epizyme says it’s ex­cit­ed by PhII da­ta, but there’s plen­ty to fret about

Epizyme ex­ecs spent most of the day on Sun­day mak­ing the case that their lead can­cer drug tazeme­to­stat just cleared an im­por­tant mile­stone at an ear­ly point in a Phase II study, demon­strat­ing an abil­i­ty to shrink tu­mors in pa­tients with non-Hodgkin lym­phoma.

But an­a­lysts say that at this ear­ly stage of de­vel­op­ment, en­thu­si­asm over signs of progress has to be tem­pered by the lim­it­ed num­ber of pa­tients who have re­spond­ed so far and cau­tion over the biotech’s high-risk strat­e­gy to shoot for an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval. That cau­tion­ary tone helped dri­ve down shares by 6% in ear­ly trad­ing to­day.

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