Cel­gene works to calm down anx­ious in­vestors, promis­ing to re-file ozan­i­mod at the FDA in ear­ly 2019

For weeks now, an­a­lysts have been fret­ting over the fu­ture of Cel­gene’s $CELG mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis drug ozan­i­mod. Turned away at the FDA’s front door with a refuse-to-file let­ter, their at­ten­tion fo­cused on an ac­tive metabo­lite of the drug and spec­u­la­tion over whether or not the big biotech would be forced to run a new hu­man study to sat­is­fy reg­u­la­tors that would set them back years.

This morn­ing, Cel­gene ex­ecs went to some pains to ex­plain that the de­lay would stretch out on­ly to Q1 2019 as re­searchers un­der­took some bridg­ing non-clin­i­cal stud­ies of the drug. No lengthy hu­man stud­ies would be need­ed, the com­pa­ny added. And they would hus­tle along a Eu­ro­pean ap­pli­ca­tion along­side the FDA pitch in the first few months of next year.

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