The nail-bit­ing among the in­vestors who held on to their con­tin­gent val­ue rights $BMYRT from the Cel­gene buy­out is giv­ing way to pan­ic to­day.

Dur­ing their Q3 call with an­a­lysts, ex­ecs said that the FDA had in­spect­ed the Both­ell, WA plant be­ing used for liso-cel (JCAR017), the CAR-T Bris­tol My­ers picked up in the deal. That’s a plus.

But there was a hitch.

They went on to say that no in­spec­tion had yet even been sched­uled for the Texas CMO in­volved. And with that, the slow trick­le of in­vestors seep­ing out of the CVR group turned in­to an in­stant rout. The stock plunged about 80% from the $3.40 still left for the CVR at the end of the day yes­ter­day. That took it down in­to pen­ny stock ter­ri­to­ry.

Bris­tol CVR took an­oth­er turn down af­ter they said on the call that an in­spec­tion of the Lon­za fa­cil­i­ty has not yet been sched­uled. $BMYRT

— Brad Lon­car (@brad­lon­car) No­vem­ber 5, 2020

Why the stam­pede?

Sal­im Syed

Re­mem­ber that dur­ing last-minute buy­out ne­go­ti­a­tions, Bris­tol My­ers CEO Gio­van­ni Caforio in­sist­ed that they re­place cash on the ta­ble with a $9 CVR tied to the ap­proval of 3 drugs by cer­tain dates. Ozan­i­mod made the dead­line, but the fate of liso-cel (JCAR017) and ide-cel are hang­ing on FDA ac­tions. Liso-cel was de­layed and ide-cel got slapped with a refuse-to-file. That drug has un­til the end of Q1 next year to make good.

As Bris­tol My­ers notes in its Q3 pre­sen­ta­tion to­day, there’s a Nov. 16 PDU­FA date loom­ing for liso-cel, and with­out a clean bill of health on CMC, reg­u­la­tors aren’t like­ly to come through with an OK for a once close­ly-watched ther­a­py that earned break­through sta­tus at the FDA. That could spell an­oth­er sig­nif­i­cant de­lay.

Sal­im Syed at Mizuho, who’s been track­ing every tiny de­tail around the CMC work — in­clud­ing pri­vate eye re­ports com­plete with tele­pho­to lens­es on the Both­ell in­spec­tion — summed it up here:

The way it was couched on the call was that this is due to COVID-19 and the FDA want­i­ng to keep its em­ploy­ees safe. How­ev­er, in­vestors were ex­pect­ing, and what seemed to make most log­i­cal sense, is to in­spect the plants to­geth­er close­ly in se­quence, Both­ell and Texas.

Syed, though, is urg­ing calm in the melee. While the PDU­FA is dat­ed Nov. 16, the dead­line on the CVR is the end of this year — still some weeks out.

Re­mem­ber, the FDA on­ly needs here about ~3 weeks (by rea­son­able stan­dards and our KOL call) post-in­spec­tion to fin­ish up all the pa­per­work and get a drug to the fin­ish line.

Be­sides, he adds, this is a BTD pro­gram, so the FDA should be will­ing to hur­ry up. The ex­ecs at Bris­tol My­ers nev­er said if there could be a vir­tu­al in­spec­tion and be­sides, the com­pa­ny al­ready said that if they learned that they would miss the PDU­FA, they’d say so prompt­ly.

So far, so good on that score. The PDU­FA re­mains in place.

But with the dead­line draw­ing very, very close, a lot of the in­vestors are bolt­ing.

With little explanation for why Merck’s potential Covid-19 antiviral was less effective in reducing Covid hospitalizations and deaths in a full analysis of a Phase III trial versus an interim look, the FDA’s antimicrobial drugs advisory committee on Tuesday voted 13-10 in favor of the pill’s benefits outweighing the risks for adults within 5 days of developing Covid symptoms.

Molnupiravir will likely be authorized by FDA in the coming days for adults with mild or moderate Covid-19. While Pfizer’s antiviral may prove to be more effective, Merck’s pill will be another weapon in the armamentarium of Covid-19 treatments for countries around the world, adding to the mAb treatments already in use in the outpatient space from Regeneron, Eli Lilly and Vir/GlaxoSmithKline.

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Drugmakers looking to design a new registry or use an existing one to support a regulatory decision on a drug’s effectiveness or safety will need to consult with a new draft guidance released Monday by the FDA.

The agency’s reliance on registry data for regulatory decisions dates back more than two decades, at least, as in 1998 Bayer won approval for its anticoagulant Refludan (withdrawn from the market in 2013 for commercial reasons) based in part on a historical control group pulled from a registry.

The FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee has decided to cancel a planned meeting on Thursday to discuss two cancer drugs that previously won accelerated approvals but failed to confirm clinical benefit in required follow-up trials or have taken a long time to finish those trials.

The FDA said in a statement that the meeting “is no longer needed” but did not offer further detail on why exactly it was canceled, telling Endpoints News to contact the companies. Attempts to contact both Secura Bio and Acrotech went unreturned. The companies may have decided to pull these treatments from the market, or they’ve come to new agreements with the agency on their confirmatory trials.