Things have just gone from bad to worse at Hop­kin­ton, MA-based Spring Bank Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

Re­searchers say that a pa­tient died in their Phase IIb study of ina­ri­givir for hep B — and they’re scrap­ping the work and shift­ing fo­cus to STING.

News of the pa­tient death came just weeks af­ter the biotech told in­vestors that safe­ty prob­lems marked by po­ten­tial liv­er dam­ag­ing he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar dys­func­tion and in­creas­es of ALT forced them to halt dos­ing over the Christ­mas break. That pause caused 1 rout for their share price, which once trad­ed north of $18 a share.

The lat­est rout fol­lowed the news Wednes­day morn­ing. The stock $SBPH tanked, drop­ping 26% more and leav­ing the share price just above the $1 mark.

Spring Bank’s work in STING cov­ers both an­tag­o­nists for in­flam­ma­to­ry con­di­tions and ag­o­nists for can­cer.

The STING strat­e­gy may not sit well with back­ers, though, as it has ex­pe­ri­enced sev­er­al set­backs at oth­er de­vel­op­ers in­ter­est­ed in see­ing its ef­fi­ca­cy in on­col­o­gy.

The biotech now plans to put its chimeric oligonu­cleotide an­ti­sense (CA­SO) pro­gram for HBV up for a li­cens­ing deal while slash­ing any HBV costs in the bud­get. “The com­pa­ny be­lieves its $54.5 mil­lion cash po­si­tion as of Dec. 31 will be enough to fund op­er­a­tions in­to late 2022.”

Following a successful Phase III study in April showcasing the safety and potential of its new sleep drug, Idorsia posted some mixed news in the second Phase III study, but that won’t stop a planned filing aimed at regulatory approval.

The drug, a dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) called daridorexant, was found to significantly improve sleep maintenance and subjective total sleep time in 25 mg doses, replicating results from the first Phase III study. However, improvements in sleep onset and daytime functioning narrowly missed statistical significance, despite numerical consistency with the April study.

By the time the FDA finally granted an accelerated OK for Immunomedics’ Trodelvy, we already got a very strong hint that their confirmatory Phase III study in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer was a success.

That’s because the independent data safety monitoring committee recommended that the trial be stopped early. But just what pointed them to the conclusion was still unclear.

“We do not know the totality of their decision other than it’s pretty evident that the primary endpoint was met; otherwise they could not request to halt the study,” Behzad Aghazadeh, the executive chairman, told Endpoints News at the time.

In the three-company race to develop a new uterine fibroid treatment, ObsEva long lagged behind AbbVie and Myovant. Still, they hoped that better efficacy — including a 93.9% response rate in one Phase III trial — could ultimately deliver better sales.

Now, though, the second of those Phase III studies is out, and it has brought the Swedish biotech back to earth.

In the second of their Phase III trials, 75.5% of patients who took ObsEva’s experimental tablet linzagolix plus a hormone saw their bleeding reduced by at least 50% and at least 80 ml after 24 weeks. Pooling those results with new data from their first Phase III trial — which showed a 93.9% response rate at 24 weeks and a 91.6% response rate at 52 weeks — ObsEva calculated a collective 84.7% responder rate for patients taking their therapy and said the data “confirm potential best-in-class” status.

Bellus Health says their Phase II study for a new drug to treat chronic cough failed, but they already lined up Plan B to help ease the sting with investors.

The biotech tested 4 different doses of BLU-5937 in the mid-stage study, all of which fell short of the mark for placebo-adjusted reductions in coughing — several by a wide margin. It also didn’t help that there was no clear dose response in the mix, with a jumble of outcomes to report. Bellus $BLU immediately tried to shift focus to a silver lining, noting that they hit statistical significance among a subgroup of “high cough count patients (all patients at or above the baseline median average of 32.4 coughs per hour).”