F-star's Eliot Forster maps a short­cut to Wall Street, bag­ging more cash to fu­el on­col­o­gy pipeline work

F-star Ther­a­peu­tics has found a short cut to Wall Street, work­ing out a re­verse deal with the strug­gling Spring Bank Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals that of­fers new av­enues to land­ing more in­vestor cash.

Spring Bank’s stock plum­met­ed last De­cem­ber when the phar­ma en­coun­tered safe­ty prob­lems dur­ing a Phase IIb tri­al of its he­pati­tis B drug, ina­ri­givir so­prox­il, high­light­ed by a pa­tient death. It stopped ad­min­is­ter­ing dos­es when three pa­tients de­vel­oped “he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar dys­func­tion and an el­e­va­tion of ala­nine transam­i­nase (ALT) po­ten­tial­ly con­sis­tent with liv­er in­jury rather than im­mune flares,” and even­tu­al­ly scrapped the pro­gram al­to­geth­er while shift­ing fo­cus to an ear­ly-stage STING pro­gram.

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