Un­want­ed by Ab­b­Vie and In­fin­i­ty, bat­tered Ve­rastem gets an OK for du­velis­ib and a sec­ond shot at suc­cess

Ve­rastem $VSTM is get­ting its prover­bial sec­ond chance.

Once bat­tered, bruised and left on the ropes af­ter the com­plete fail­ure of the ini­tial strat­e­gy mapped by Christoph West­phal, the ex­ec­u­tive team at Ve­rastem snapped up a tar­nished star as In­fin­i­ty hap­pi­ly hand­ed off its per­fect­ly ap­prov­able — but com­mer­cial­ly un­ex­cit­ing — PI3K drug du­velis­ib for ex­act­ly noth­ing up front.

To­day, the FDA did its part, hand­ing over an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval for the drug, which will now be sold as Copik­tra, the on­ly gam­ma/delta in­hibitor on the mar­ket for third-line cas­es of chron­ic lym­pho­cyt­ic leukemia/small lym­pho­cyt­ic lym­phoma. And the agency al­so of­fered up a tan­dem OK as a 3rd-line ther­a­py for fol­lic­u­lar lym­phoma.

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