A snap­shot of up­beat PhII NASH da­ta — from a very small tri­al — trig­gers a fren­zy for Viking’s stock

Viking Ther­a­peu­tics $VK­TX has proven once again that noth­ing whips up biotech in­vestors like pos­i­tive Phase II num­bers for NASH.

The San Diego-based biotech’s shares rock­et­ed up more than 100% Tues­day morn­ing on Viking’s boast that VK2809 slashed liv­er fat con­tent — a bio­mark­er for the dis­ease — while de­liv­er­ing a drop of 20% or more in LDL in the mid-stage study. 

Jef­feries’ Michael Yee looked it over and boiled the da­ta down to this: “57-60% me­di­an rel­a­tive change in liv­er fat by MRI-PDFF in­clud­ing a 77-91% re­spon­der rate on >30% fat re­duc­tion hur­dle; and they looked at ‘su­per’ re­spon­ders of >50% fat re­duc­tion of which was 61-73% re­sponse rate….while cross-tri­al in non-iden­ti­cal pop­u­la­tions, MDGL was a bit low­er at 36-42% me­di­an rel­a­tive change and 60-75% achiev­ing the >30% re­duc­tion thresh­old. (2) LDL-cho­les­terol re­duc­tion was ‘greater than 20%’ and in the ball­park of MDGL al­so 19-21% on an op­ti­mal dose of MGL-3196.”

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