Months af­ter bury­ing its third and fi­nal clin­i­cal pro­gram, Vi­cal has turned to a re­verse merg­er with Brick­ell Biotech to put an end to its mis­ery.

Robert Brown Brick­ell

The new com­pa­ny — in which Vi­cal in­vestors will re­tain a 40% own­er­ship — will op­er­ate un­der Brick­ell’s name and agen­da, fo­cus­ing on se­ri­ous der­ma­to­log­ic dis­or­ders like hy­per­hidro­sis, cu­ta­neous T-cell lym­phoma and pso­ri­a­sis. Fol­low­ing the all-stock trans­ac­tion, No­vaQue­st Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment has pledged $25 mil­lion to fund near-term R&D, adding to the $35 mil­lion in cash re­serve that Vi­cal brings.

For Vi­cal in­vestors, CEO Vi­jay Samant says, the deal gives them a stake in a po­ten­tial best-in-class ther­a­py for ax­il­lary hy­per­hidro­sis or ex­ces­sive sweat­ing. A top­i­cal soft an­ti­cholin­er­gic, sof­piro­ni­um bro­mide is now on the cusp of a Phase III af­ter Brick­ell’s de­vel­op­ment part­ner Kak­en re­port­ed pos­i­tive late-stage re­sults in Japan.

Brick­ell CEO Robert Brown, who jumped from Eli Lil­ly late last year, said to ex­pect topline da­ta for sof­piro­ni­um bro­mide in Q4 2020 while his team fur­ther de­vel­ops the pipeline of skin dis­ease treat­ments.

Vi­jay Samant Vi­cal

Samant him­self hasn’t had a great track record pre­dict­ing suc­cess for drug de­vel­op­ment pro­grams — con­sid­er­ing he’s axed three clin­i­cal-stage pro­grams in less than two years, ac­com­pa­nied with a cou­ple of rounds of lay­offs — but he added that Brick­ell’s ex­ec team brings ex­pe­ri­ence launch­ing drugs for oth­er com­pa­nies.

The dis­as­trous streak be­gan last Jan­u­ary with a Phase III cy­tomegalovirus vac­cine part­nered with Astel­las, which had al­ready failed a her­pes study in 2016. Then Vi­cal scrapped an­oth­er Phase II bi­va­lent vac­cine can­di­date for her­pes sim­plex virus type 2, turn­ing to an an­ti­fun­gal li­censed from Astel­las, on­ly to give up this Feb­ru­ary and go through a fi­nal re­struc­tur­ing.

Dur­ing this time, the biotech saw val­ue steadi­ly leak from its stock, hov­er­ing just above $1 (in con­trast with a high of $14.8 in 2015). Shares $VI­CL lift­ed 31.3% for a fi­nal ral­ly pre-mar­ket, though that on­ly trans­lat­ed to $1.51 in dol­lar terms.

The val­u­a­tion for Vi­cal was $40 mil­lion, a pre­mi­um over its 30-day vol­ume weight­ed av­er­age share price as well as its mar­ket cap of $26.25 mil­lion.

Brick­ell, which was val­ued at $60 mil­lion in the deal, has yet to pick out a new tick­er on the Nas­daq.

Im­age: Shut­ter­stock

Inovio was one of the first vaccine developers to snag attention for a jab that their execs said promised to end the Covid-19 pandemic. Using their own unique DNA tech, CEO Joseph Kim said it took just 3 hours to work it out.

But while rivals are racing to the finish line with ambitious plans to make vast quantities of their vaccines with billions of dollars of deals, Inovio is still stuck at the starting line on manufacturing.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.