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.”

When Michael Shpigelmacher started the project, he knew he’d have to fund it himself. Every other effort of its kind was academic, rejected as too risky by investors.

Shpigelmacher, a robotics geek and entrepeneur who had drifted into consulting for pharma, wanted to build the real-life equivalent of technology from the 1960s film Fantastic Voyage, the one where a submarine crew is shrunk to “about the size of a microbe” and sent on a mission to repair a scientist’s brain. He scanned the literature, found the lab that was working on the most advanced project — at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, it turned out — and started funding them with money from his own account, along with some seed cash from friends and family.

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.