Cel­lec­tar climbs (then sinks) on PhII DL­B­CL da­ta; Vyr­i­ad inks deal with Pfiz­er/Mer­ck KGaA

→ The stock is yo-yoing for Madi­son, WI-based Cel­lec­tar Bio­sciences $CLRB, which climbed yes­ter­day on news of a Phase II can­cer tri­al and im­me­di­ate­ly dropped a few per­cent­age points this morn­ing. Yes­ter­day, the com­pa­ny re­port­ed that one pa­tient in its Phase II tri­al had a ma­jor im­prove­ment in the amount of tu­mor ma­te­r­i­al in her body — about a 94% re­duc­tion. The tri­al was test­ing Cel­lec­tar’s can­cer ther­a­py CLR 131 against cer­tain B-cell ma­lig­nan­cies. To­day, Cel­lec­tar an­nounced fur­ther da­ta. Based on a sin­gle in­tra­venous ad­min­is­tra­tion of CLR 131, the over­all re­sponse rate was 33% and the dis­ease con­trol rate was 50%. “We are very en­cour­aged by the strong re­sponse rates and mean­ing­ful re­duc­tions in tu­mor vol­umes seen in the tri­al to date in this very sick and heav­i­ly pre­treat­ed re­lapsed/re­frac­to­ry DL­B­CL pa­tient pop­u­la­tion,” said James Caru­so, pres­i­dent and CEO of Cel­lec­tar, in a state­ment. “We be­lieve these da­ta com­bined with the ac­tiv­i­ty seen to date in oth­er hema­to­log­ic ma­lig­nan­cies fur­ther val­i­date the con­tin­ued de­vel­op­ment of CLR 131.”

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