That Alzheimer's drug that flunked a PhII? On sec­ond look, Bio­gen/Ei­sai say it's a win­ner

Sev­en months ago, Bio­gen and Ei­sai were forced to aban­don their plans for a quick piv­ot in­to Phase III as their Alzheimer’s drug BAN2401 failed a de­ci­sive Phase II. Now, with the full 18-month analy­sis in hand, the part­ners are say­ing they were right to per­sist.

Bio­gen’s stock $BI­IB surged 17.48% in pre-mar­ket trad­ing on an up­dat­ed snap­shot, a con­sid­er­able boost giv­en the size of the com­pa­ny. So far, the com­pa­ny has added rough­ly $10 bil­lion to its mar­ket cap since yes­ter­day. Mean­while BioArc­tic, the small Swedish biotech whose re­search al­liance with Ei­sai first gave birth to the prod­uct, saw their shares (CPH: $BIOA-B) sky­rock­et 209% as of press time.

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