Penn­syl­va­nia biotech Treve­na put out word Thurs­day morn­ing that it slashed 25% of its full-time staff and ter­mi­nat­ed a sales force agree­ment with Sy­neos, on top of a da­ta read­out it tout­ed as pos­i­tive.

The biotech’s on­ly ap­proved prod­uct, mar­ket­ed as Olin­vyk, was OK’ed back in 2020 for mod­er­ate to se­vere acute pain. The opi­oid was orig­i­nal­ly spurned by the FDA back in 2018 af­ter ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta was mixed com­pared to mor­phine at key dos­es and the agency want­ed more safe­ty da­ta. Two years lat­er, it got ap­proved for use in a hos­pi­tal set­ting, al­so get­ting a black box warn­ing about ad­dic­tion, abuse, res­pi­ra­to­ry de­pres­sion and more.

The com­pa­ny al­so re­port­ed that it put in­to place oth­er cost-cut­ting mea­sures that ex­ecs be­lieve will help re­duce ex­pens­es and ex­tend the cash run­way to mid-2023. The biotech, as of the end of June, said it has $49.5 mil­lion in cash and equiv­a­lents.

Car­rie Bour­dow

“We al­so re­main fo­cused on ad­vanc­ing the clin­i­cal stud­ies for TRV045, our nov­el S1P re­cep­tor mod­u­la­tor, and our re­cent cor­po­rate re­align­ment will help us in­crease fi­nan­cial flex­i­bil­i­ty to dri­ve for­ward our strate­gic pri­or­i­ties,” Treve­na pres­i­dent and CEO Car­rie Bour­dow added in a state­ment.

TRV045 is be­ing de­vel­oped for acute and chron­ic neu­ro­path­ic pain sec­ondary to di­a­bet­ic pe­riph­er­al neu­ropa­thy, and in part­ner­ship with the NIH. The biotech is ad­vanc­ing a Phase I study of the can­di­date for di­a­bet­ic neu­ro­path­ic pain, which is on track to fin­ish by the end of 2022.

Treve­na al­so not­ed that a deal was reached with an un­named hos­pi­tal group pur­chas­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion (GPO), which will al­low for ac­cess to Olin­vyk for mem­ber hos­pi­tals.

On top of that, the biotech re­port­ed a da­ta read­out with topline re­sults from its post-ap­proval study on cog­ni­tive func­tion in sub­jects treat­ed with Olin­vyk com­pared to IV-ad­min­is­tered mor­phine. The pri­ma­ry end­point was a “sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in se­da­tion ver­sus IV mor­phine,” mea­sured by “sac­cadic eye move­ment peak ve­loc­i­ty.”

Sec­ondary end­points in­clud­ed re­ac­tion time, mo­tor func­tion and hand-eye co­or­di­na­tion. Treve­na de­scribed the re­sults as pos­i­tive.

Shares of $TRVN were up 10% in pre-mar­ket trad­ing, but have been down more than 80% over the last year. The biotech had been trad­ing un­der $1 since last No­vem­ber, re­ceiv­ing a no­tice from Nas­daq back in De­cem­ber that it had six months to get back in com­pli­ance. Treve­na filed for an ex­ten­sion, which was grant­ed by Nas­daq last month and set a new dead­line of Dec. 19, 2022.

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