With its cash re­serves shrink­ing and its stock stuck in pen­ny stock ter­ri­to­ry, tiny Si­en­na Bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is bring­ing in Cowen to ex­plore what kind of fi­nan­cial and strate­gic al­ter­na­tives it can drum up at this point. And that event is point­ing shares south again.

Fred­er­ick Bed­ding­field Si­en­na

Si­en­na needs to raise cash to pay for a planned Phase III piv­otal of their new lead drug SNA-120, a Tr­kA in­hibitor for pso­ri­a­sis, which the biotech says won’t get start­ed with­out the mon­ey to pay for it.

Si­en­na raised $65 mil­lion from its IPO a few years ago, pric­ing at $15 a share. The stock $SNNA lat­er climbed, but then crashed on clin­i­cal fail­ure. Two stud­ies for its lead ac­ne drug failed a year ago, dis­ap­point­ing in­vestors and leav­ing the stock at 85 cents at the Fri­day close.

The stock quick­ly lost 11% on the news Mon­day.

“These da­ta are clear and un­am­bigu­ous,” CEO Fred­er­ick Bed­ding­field said at the time of the set­back. In­vestors haven’t been quick to for­give.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.

For nearly a decade now, the low-profile Cambridge biotech Kymab has been battling in US, UK, Japanese and Australian courts with the biotech behemoth Regeneron.

Regeneron has turned itself into a $70 billion company off of a platform of transgenically humanized mice they can use to make antibodies for anything from Ebola to colorectal cancer. The technology took decades and billions to build, 20 years from the company’s founding to the first approved drug. And the company guards and touts it zealously, breaking their production process down into various branded components — Velocimmune, Velocigene, Velocimouse and four other Velocis — and sometimes suing would-be copycats. In 2014, most notably, they sued two Pfizer-backed entities for patent infringement.