Cy­to­Dyn re­al­ly, re­al­ly want­ed to put its best foot for­ward.

So much so that, af­ter sit­ting on un­blind­ed Phase IIb/III da­ta on leron­limab in Covid-19 for two weeks pend­ing reg­u­la­to­ry dis­cus­sions, the biotech is­sued six press re­leas­es over the week­end, each of­fer­ing a lit­tle more in­for­ma­tion or re­fin­ing what was pre­vi­ous­ly dis­closed.

In one of them, Cy­to­Dyn ac­knowl­edged that leron­limab — an an­ti-CCR5 an­ti­body that had al­ready been turned away at the FDA’s doorsteps once — had failed the pri­ma­ry end­point of low­er­ing all-cause mor­tal­i­ty at Day 28, as the re­sult was not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. At best, ex­ecs im­plied, they would need to col­lect fur­ther clin­i­cal da­ta to be ready for reg­u­la­to­ry re­views.

Shares $CY­DY slid 20.99% to $3.20 once the stock mar­ket opened on Mon­day.

That’s not what they chose to high­light, though.

Rather, Cy­to­Dyn zoomed in on a sub­group that ac­count­ed for 62 out of 384 pa­tients en­rolled in the CD12 tri­al and de­clared a sur­vival ben­e­fit. Where­as the tri­al in­volved se­vere to crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients, the com­pa­ny found that me­chan­i­cal­ly ven­ti­lat­ed crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients saw a 24% re­duc­tion in all cause-mor­tal­i­ty be­tween the leron­limab and place­bo arms, with­out break­ing down the num­ber of deaths in ei­ther group.

Nad­er Pourhas­san

“We be­lieve these re­sults are the best re­sults ever achieved for this pop­u­la­tion in a Phase 3 clin­i­cal tri­al,” CEO Nad­er Pourhas­san boast­ed in one of the state­ments.

Fur­ther mas­sag­ing the da­ta, ex­ecs point­ed out that there were more over-65 pa­tients tak­ing leron­limab than place­bo — lead­ing them to con­duct a post hoc “age ad­just­ment” analy­sis and de­duce “(s)ta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant re­sults (p-val­ue = 0.0319)” for the pri­ma­ry end­point “in par­tic­i­pants re­ceiv­ing leron­limab + ‘com­mon­ly used COVID-19 treat­ments’ com­pared to par­tic­i­pants who re­ceived ‘com­mon­ly used COVID-19 treat­ments’ alone in the place­bo group in the over­all mod­i­fied in­tent-to-treat (‘mITT’) pop­u­la­tion.”

Not that it helped with the main out­come mea­sure:

When age ad­just­ment was con­duct­ed, the pri­ma­ry end­point was much clos­er to sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant val­ue. Of note, the re­duc­tion of mor­tal­i­ty in this pop­u­la­tion of 65 years and younger leron­limab arm had more than 30% less mor­tal­i­ty than place­bo and 9% less mor­tal­i­ty in par­tic­i­pants over 65.

But Cy­to­Dyn claimed it’s got­ten reg­u­la­tors on board with the sub­group hy­poth­e­sis: The UK’s MHRA is ap­par­ent­ly will­ing to ac­cept da­ta from the open-la­bel ex­ten­sion of the study, which has en­rolled 45 so far. The US agency is ask­ing for da­ta from 140 more pa­tients in the crit­i­cal­ly ill pop­u­la­tion, with the new pri­ma­ry end­point of length of hos­pi­tal stay (ac­cord­ing to Cy­to­Dyn, leron­limab had short­ened time to re­cov­ery by 6 days among these pa­tients com­pared to place­bo plus stan­dard of care on­ly, with a p-val­ue of 0.005). In Cana­da, the com­pa­ny will ap­ply to start sell­ing the drug while clin­i­cal tri­als con­tin­ue — with un­clear prospects.

Some of the un­cer­tain­ty may be an­swered af­ter Cy­to­Dyn re­leas­es de­tailed re­sults on the tri­al, which it is plan­ning to do lat­er to­day. Or at the in­vestor we­b­cast sched­uled right be­fore it.

There’s just one caveat: It will be a “lis­ten on­ly” we­b­cast — in­vestors can sub­mit their ques­tions on­line.

Nad­er Pourhas­san (Pho­to by Jeff Kravitz/Film­Mag­ic for Cy­to­Dyn’s Pro)

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

Sometimes, being late can give you an advantage.

That’s what Sanofi and GSK are trying to say as the Big Pharma partners report positive results from a late-stage trial of their next-gen bivalent Covid-19 vaccine, which was designed to protect against both the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Beta variant. Specifically, against Omicron, they note, the vaccine delivered 72% efficacy in all adults and 93.2% in those previously infected.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

The first in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing program has some new durability data showing sustained reduction of a toxic protein in ATTR amyloidosis at all four dose levels in a small 15-patient study.

Intellia Therapeutics presented the much-anticipated data for its Regeneron-collaborated NTLA-2001 Friday morning, adding to the initial Phase I results it first delivered almost a year ago to the day.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”