Aslan $ASLN has stum­bled back in­to the fail­ure pit.

When their lead drug failed to treat gas­tric can­cer, Aslan Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals an­nounced they were go­ing to fo­cus on an­oth­er type: bil­iary tract can­cer (BTC). When the gas­tric fail­ure forced them to cut 30% of their staff, they again em­pha­sized the new tar­get as one of three re­main­ing pro­grams.

But Aslan’s BTC tri­al has now failed on both pri­ma­ry end­points. The re­sults showed an im­proved re­sponse rate for Aslan’s var­l­i­tinib over the con­trol arm, but not sig­nif­i­cant­ly.  The drug arm had a pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival rate of 2.83 months com­pared to 2.79 in the con­trol arm — ba­si­cal­ly a one-day dif­fer­ence.

The fail­ure leaves Aslan with two ma­jor pro­grams left — one for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and one for atopic der­mati­tis (AD) — and a pre­car­i­ous fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion. In their Q3, Aslan re­vealed they were burn­ing through $7 mil­lion per quar­ter and had just $8 mil­lion left in cash and cash equiv­a­lents.

With Mon­day’s news, their stock tum­bled 56%, from $2.08 per share to $0.91. Mar­ket cap fell to $21 mil­lion.

Carl Firth Aslan

Last month the Sin­ga­pore-based com­pa­ny se­cured a $3 mil­lion loan from the board and ma­jor in­vestors in­tend­ed, CEO Carl Firth said at the time, to buoy the com­pa­ny in ad­vance of these da­ta and re­sults com­ing ear­ly next year on AD. Aslan did not say ex­plic­it­ly they are now aban­don­ing the BTC pro­gram but they made no ref­er­ence to fu­ture plans, and to­day Firth said in a state­ment:

“I would like to ex­tend our thanks to the pa­tients, tri­al in­ves­ti­ga­tors and site per­son­nel who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the study and to the ASLAN team for their com­mit­ment to the de­vel­op­ment of var­l­i­tinib. ASLAN re­mains fo­cused on the promis­ing mol­e­cules in its port­fo­lio, in­clud­ing the on­go­ing study in atopic der­mati­tis of ASLAN004, our IL-13 re­cep­tor an­ti­body which blocks sig­nalling through IL-4 and IL-13.”

Much is hang­ing on the 2020 atopic der­mati­tis re­sults. Aslan be­gan dos­ing for the sec­ond part of a Phase I study on its an­ti­body last month, with plans for a fol­low-up study on the most ef­fi­ca­cious dose.

Aslan has com­plet­ed the first part of a Phase II study for their drug for AML, a no­to­ri­ous­ly eva­sive drug tar­get, and said some pa­tients ex­pe­ri­enced up to 98% re­duc­tion in pe­riph­er­al blood blast cells. But since re­port­ing that in their Q2, the com­pa­ny has said lit­tle about the pro­gram.

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.