Mile­stone Phar­ma had all the ear­marks of a clas­sic biotech IPO sto­ry when it went pub­lic last year.

The lit­tle 12-year-old biotech had pos­i­tive mid-stage da­ta to tout to in­vestors that un­der­scored the po­ten­tial of a nasal spray treat­ment to halt parox­ys­mal supraven­tric­u­lar tachy­car­dia — or PSVT — events. A big syn­di­cate put up $80 mil­lion to help them lay a com­mer­cial foun­da­tion. And the stock peaked soon af­ter the com­pa­ny de­buted on Nas­daq as they raised an­oth­er $82 mil­lion.

But the Mile­stone team — and the stock $MIST — crashed at an ug­ly twist in the Phase III de­vel­op­ment path. Their drug, etri­pamil, a fast-act­ing cal­ci­um chan­nel block­er, failed the pri­ma­ry. Shares were rout­ed, free-falling 72% ahead of the bell.

The biotech, based in Mon­tre­al, was look­ing to of­fer an at-home so­lu­tion to a rapid heart­beat that usu­al­ly is un­threat­en­ing but sends some peo­ple back to the ER over and over again. At Phase II, re­searchers said they tracked suc­cess rates of 65% to 95%, beat­ing out the 35% place­bo score.

The pri­ma­ry end­point was a com­par­i­son of the nasal ther­a­py with place­bo over 5 hours in turn­ing SVT to si­nus rhythm, and it fell far short of the mark on sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance with a val­ue of 0.12. It al­so fell short on re­duc­ing trips for emer­gency care, with the same p val­ue.

Joseph Olive­to Mile­stone

Mile­stone, though, isn’t go­ing to give up at this point with­out a strug­gle. There was a pos­i­tive hit on pa­tient-re­port­ed treat­ment sat­is­fac­tion, a pos­i­tive “trend” on the ER mea­sure and they drilled down to make the case on the drug’s ear­ly im­pact. And that’s what they’re tak­ing to the FDA now for ex­plorato­ry talks.

“(O)ut­comes af­ter 100 min­utes, which were af­fect­ed by a very small num­ber of place­bo pa­tients re­main­ing in the study at that time, sug­gest that the de­sign and analy­sis plan used in NODE-301 neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed the study’s out­come,”  said CEO Joseph Olive­to in a state­ment.

There’s more da­ta to come, but the com­pa­ny is sound­ing a note of cau­tion on how the Covid-19 out­break might af­fect tri­al op­er­a­tions at this stage.

So­cial im­age: Joseph Olive­to, Mile­stone Phar­ma

Four years ago, when Arena CEO Amit Munshi cut its ties to a troubled weight drug and doubled down on the pipeline, a cannabinoid receptor 2 agonist figured prominently in the biotech’s future. On Tuesday evening, however, Munshi’s high hopes for the drug took a nasty hit after it failed a Phase IIb study for patients with irritable bowel syndrome pain.

Put through a randomized pace with 273 patients, researchers said it flat failed the primary endpoint among the large group with abdominal pain. But they quickly went on to highlight subgroup data, always a tricky and controversial ploy, where they spotlighted a positive p value for patients with moderate to severe pain who received the high dose of the drug — one of 3 provided in the study.

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

“The need for new anti-infectives capable of fighting the most resistant pathogens has never been more urgent as we confront the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic,” CEO Marco Taglietti said in a statement.

When Takeda spun out a pipeline of experimental psychiatry drugs to Neurocrine in a $2 billion deal amid a post-merger shakeout, R&D chief Andy Plump described the therapies as “very interesting but still difficult.”

On Tuesday, we got some idea of how difficult.

San Diego-based Neurocrine revealed that one of the three spotlight clinical programs they’d acquired failed the primary endpoint in a Phase II trial for schizophrenia, registering a negative outcome on the change from baseline in the positive and negative syndrome scale/negative symptom factor score (PANSS NSFS).

Merck took a big gamble when it opted to jump into the Covid-19 vaccine race late, and made an equally momentous decision to back out in late January. Now, looking to chip in on the effort, Merck reportedly agreed to team up with one of the companies that has already crossed the finish line.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is expected to announce a partnership between drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson to jointly produce J&J’s recombinant protein Covid-19 vaccine that received the FDA’s emergency use authorization Saturday, the Washington Post reported.

FibroGen will likely have to delay its US rollout for roxadustat once again.

In an unexpected move, the FDA is convening its Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Advisory Committee to review the NDA in an advisory committee meeting. The date is yet to be confirmed.

Just a few weeks ago, SVB Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges predicted that the roxa approval could come ahead of the PDUFA date on March 20 — effusive despite already being let down once by the FDA’s extension of its review back in December. AstraZeneca, which is partnered with FibroGen on the chronic kidney disease-related anemia drug, disclosed regulators had requested further clarifying analyses of clinical data.