Less than a month af­ter Prax­is Pre­ci­sion Med­i­cines hit Wall Street with an up­sized IPO, the FDA has slapped a clin­i­cal hold on its lead can­di­date for ma­jor de­pres­sive dis­or­der (MDD), send­ing shares spi­ral­ing.

With­out pro­vid­ing much in­for­ma­tion, the FDA said in an email that it re­viewed Prax­is’ IND for its Phase II/III tri­al, and is plac­ing a full clin­i­cal hold on the study. More de­tails should come in the next 30 days, ac­cord­ing to the email. Prax­is says it has reached out to the agency, which said it isn’t done fi­nal­iz­ing com­ments.

“The FDA has not pro­vid­ed any rea­son for the clin­i­cal hold,” Prax­is said in a state­ment. Ac­cord­ing to an S-1/A filed on Oct 15, the study would have sat­is­fied one of two reg­is­tra­tional tri­als re­quired by the FDA to sup­port clin­i­cal ef­fi­ca­cy. The biotech’s stock $PRAX plunged more than 26% af­ter the news broke on Tues­day.

Cowen an­a­lysts aren’t wor­ried, though. In a note to in­vestors on Tues­day, an­a­lysts Ritu Bar­al and Ly­la Youssef said they be­lieve the hold “should be re­solved in short or­der giv­en the con­tin­ued clean pre­clin­i­cal and clin­i­cal safe­ty pro­file.” The can­di­date, PRAX-114, is cur­rent­ly in an on­go­ing Phase IIa tri­al in Aus­tralia. Part A en­rolled 33 MDD pa­tients, and ear­ly da­ta sug­gest “rapid, marked im­prove­ments in de­pres­sion scores” af­ter two weeks of treat­ment, ac­cord­ing to the an­a­lysts. Af­ter one week, pa­tients showed LS mean Hamil­ton De­pres­sion Rat­ing Scale im­prove­ments of 15 to 19 points across three dose groups.

The can­di­date, GA­BA pos­i­tive al­losteric mod­u­la­tor, is al­so in Phase II tri­als for per­i­menopausal de­pres­sion. The field is a tough one, with sci­en­tists strug­gling for years to de­vel­op bet­ter an­ti-de­pres­sants. Last De­cem­ber, Sage Ther­a­peu­tics’ MDD drug flopped in a large tri­al, cost­ing the com­pa­ny $6 bil­lion in mar­ket cap and forc­ing it to cut half of em­ploy­ees.

If PRAX-114 gets ap­proved, Cowen pre­dicts its US sales po­ten­tial will  be in the $3 bil­lion range.

Prax­is emerged from stealth mode this spring, with $100 mil­lion and two drugs in Phase II. It ini­tial­ly set out to iden­ti­fy mu­ta­tions that cause epilep­sy in pa­tients who didn’t in­her­it the dis­ease, and is now ap­ply­ing those dis­cov­er­ies to oth­er CNS dis­eases, like de­pres­sion, move­ment dis­or­ders and pain syn­dromes. In Ju­ly, Prax­is bagged an­oth­er $110 mil­lion in a Se­ries C1 led by Even­tide As­set Man­age­ment.

Even­tide holds 9.4% of Prax­is’ stock, ac­cord­ing to the S-1/A. Black­stone, No­vo Hold­ings and Vi­da Ven­tures, which al­so kicked in on the round, have 23.1%, 6/6% and 7.3% re­spec­tive­ly.

Back in Au­gust, Prax­is filed for a $100 mil­lion IPO. It end­ed up bring­ing in $190 mil­lion, from $10 mil­lion shares priced at $19 apiece — a buck high­er than the $17 to $18 range. Be­tween $70 to $80 mil­lion was tagged for PRAX-114.

Two biotechs said they got turned away by the FDA on Wednesday, in part due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

North Carolina-based Liquidia Technologies was handed a CRL for its lead pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, citing the need for more CMC data and on-site pre-approval inspections, which the FDA hasn’t been able to conduct due to travel restrictions. The agency also deferred its decision on Revance Therapeutics’ BLA for its frown line treatment, because it needs to inspect the company’s northern California manufacturing facility. The action, Revance emphasized, was not a CRL.

A month and a half after becoming the experimental treatment of choice for a newly diagnosed president, Regeneron’s antibody cocktail has received emergency use authorization from the FDA. It will be used to treat non-hospitalized Covid-19 patients who are at high-risk of progressing.

Although the Rgeneron drug is not the first antibody treatment authorized by the FDA, the news comes as a significant milestone for a company and a treatment scientists have watched closely since the outbreak began.

Just as Urovant gets ready for its first big FDA decision on vibegron, the drug has flopped in what would’ve been a follow-on indication.

In a Phase IIa trial involving women with abdominal pain due to irritable bowel syndrome, vibegron failed to meet the bar on improving “average worst abdominal pain” over 12 weeks, compared to placebo, among IBS-D patients.

There were actually slightly more responders in the placebo group than in the drug arm, with only 40.9% of those randomized to vigebron achieving at least a 30% decrease in “worst abdominal pain” in the past 24 hours. The trial enrolled 222 women but only 189 completed the study.