Es­pe­ri­on’s ex­ec­u­tive team spent years in­sist­ing that they had found the sweet spot in the mar­ket for their cho­les­terol drug. But that strat­e­gy has soured bad­ly, and af­ter strug­gling to sell its heart dis­ease pill for more than a year, the biotech says it will cut about 40% of its staff over the next few weeks.

The lay­offs will take place across the board, from sales and mar­ket­ing to R&D, CEO Shel­don Koenig told End­points News on Mon­day. While the chief ex­ec­u­tive de­clined to elab­o­rate on how many em­ploy­ees will be af­fect­ed, an SEC fil­ing stat­ed that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 170 staffers are on the chop­ping block.

The re­duc­tions, which will be com­plete by the end of the month, are ex­pect­ed to save the com­pa­ny up to $80 mil­lion go­ing in­to 2022, Koenig said. Es­pe­ri­on’s stock $ES­PR dipped about 4.7% up­on the news, with shares pric­ing at $8.71 apiece. Shares have fall­en more than 74% over the last year.

Nexle­tol, Es­pe­ri­on’s “goldilocks” cho­les­terol ther­a­py al­so known as be­mpe­doic acid, was ap­proved back in ear­ly 2020 as an oral op­tion that’s bet­ter than decades-old statins, but not as ef­fec­tive — or as ex­pen­sive — as in­jectable PC­SK9 ther­a­pies. A week lat­er, the FDA ap­proved Nexl­izet, a com­bi­na­tion of be­mpe­doic acid and eze­tim­ibe (an­oth­er cho­les­terol-low­er­ing med­i­cine).

Es­pe­ri­on thought that with a smart pric­ing strat­e­gy — Nexle­tol costs just over $11 per day — it could beat out the pricey PC­SK9s Repatha and Pralu­ent.

But launch­ing a heart drug amid the pan­dem­ic proved to be a chal­lenge. Pa­tients were see­ing their doc­tors less of­ten, sales forces couldn’t trav­el, and even if they could, physi­cians’ of­fices weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly open to reps. Es­pe­ri­on pock­et­ed just $12.1 mil­lion last year on a drug they al­ways be­lieved would be a block­buster.

In April, Es­pe­ri­on turned to Dai­ichi Sankyo, the Japan­ese phar­ma that was al­ready com­mer­cial­iz­ing Nexle­tol in Eu­rope and Japan. Es­pe­ri­on struck a deal with Dai­ichi to mar­ket the drug in oth­er re­gions in ex­change for $30 mil­lion cash, tiered roy­al­ties and $175 mil­lion in mile­stones.

“It def­i­nite­ly was prob­a­bly the hard­est time to ever launch prod­ucts, right in the mid­dle of Covid, which was March of 2020,” Koenig said.

Koenig took the helm in May, short­ly af­ter long­time for­mer CEO Tim Mayleben aban­doned his post. At the time, the com­pa­ny’s stock had been trad­ing for less than half of what it was when Nexle­tol was ap­proved in Feb­ru­ary.

The chief ex­ec­u­tive says the com­pa­ny has seen a bit of a boost in the last cou­ple quar­ters, with de­mand ris­ing 30% be­tween first and sec­ond quar­ter this year, and 10% be­tween sec­ond and third.

The com­pa­ny’s cur­rent­ly work­ing on a Phase III tri­al dubbed CLEAR Out­comes in car­dio­vas­cu­lar pa­tients who have statin in­tol­er­ance and el­e­vat­ed LDL-C, or “bad” cho­les­terol lev­els. Topline re­sults from that study are com­ing in ear­ly 2023, Koenig said.

“We still be­lieve that we can con­tin­ue to have con­sis­tent growth be­tween now and when the CLEAR Out­comes study re­ports out,” he added.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.

The National Institutes of Health has again declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas and Pfizer’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi despite being invented at UCLA with grants from the US Army and NIH.

“Given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug,” NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News. The institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public,” an indication that there was not a pressing need for the US to act.