With its mar­ket val­ue mired deep in the cel­lar of mi­cro­cap stocks and its fran­chise drug strug­gling to gain trac­tion, Acor­da CEO Ron Co­hen is once again bring­ing out the bud­get ax to chop away at what re­mains of the once high-fly­ing biotech.

Acor­da is now let­ting go 15% of the re­main­ing staff — there’s no head count on that — with plans to start ad­di­tion­al out­sourc­ing. Com­bin­ing those cuts should de­liv­er $20 mil­lion in an­nu­al sav­ings as the biotech looks to stop the chron­ic flow of red ink.

Acor­da $ACOR was brought low back in 2018 af­ter it lost patent pro­tec­tion on Ampyra, with gener­ics eat­ing in­to its one-time cash cow — which now de­liv­ers a lit­tle more than $20 mil­lion a quar­ter. The Acor­da team had raced ahead with a new drug, In­bri­ja, but have man­aged on­ly mi­nus­cule sales that ticked up to $6.4 mil­lion in Q2, lead­ing to a loss of $23 mil­lion.

Against that back­drop, Co­hen has been forced to cut and cut again.

Co­hen was forced to cut a quar­ter of his staff in the fall of 2019, when cash re­serves were at $253 mil­lion. That fol­lowed a ma­jor re­struc­tur­ing in 2017, as Acor­da braced for the im­pact of gener­ic com­pe­ti­tion. And it’s been sell­ing as­sets along the way, in­clud­ing its man­u­fac­tur­ing and pack­ag­ing ops, which went to Catal­ent ear­ly this year.

Co­hen cred­it­ed the com­pa­ny, though, vow­ing to do bet­ter once the pan­dem­ic fades:

When the pan­dem­ic sub­sides, we be­lieve that we will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ac­cel­er­ate In­bri­ja’s tra­jec­to­ry, as in-per­son in­ter­ac­tions with health care providers and pa­tients re­turn to more nor­mal lev­els. The head­count re­duc­tions and struc­tur­al changes we have made will en­able us to op­er­ate more ef­fi­cient­ly and fur­ther align our ex­pens­es with rev­enue, while con­tin­u­ing to grow In­bri­ja sales.

The Federal Trade Commission has gotten involved in a patent feud over Supernus’ Parkinson’s drug Apokyn, a case the agency said may have ‘‘significant implications” for patients who rely on the drug.

Sage Chemical won the first generic approval for its Apokyn formulation (also known as apomorphine hydrochloride injection) back in 2022. The non-ergoline dopamine agonist is approved to treat Parkinson’s symptoms during “off episodes,” such as difficulty moving, tremors and intense cramping. However, regulators specified that the approval pertained to the generic drug cartridges only, not the injector pen required for administration.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) last year sought to find ways to better coordinate large-scale clinical trials in the US — as the UK lead by example during the pandemic — especially for these emergency clinical trials.

The lobbying group PhRMA Tuesday called for more clinical trial diversity in underserved areas, including by making participation less of a burden, and expanding eligibility criteria when appropriate.

The FDA on Tuesday released a warning letter sent earlier this month to the Mason, OH-based site of Procter & Gamble Manufactura, raising questions about the list of ingredients on the label and in the electronic filing.

The warning says that for P&G’s over-the-counter Vicks Nyquil Severe Hot Remedy Cold and Flu Plus Congestion, there’s a “mismatched” list of active ingredients between the labeling and the electronic listing file. The listing file for the active ingredients did not match the active ingredients in the electronic file.