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

Vertex has clinched a priority review for the all-important cystic fibrosis triple that will blaze the trail for treating a large group of patients unhelped by its current drugs.

FDA regulators have set a PDUFA date of March 19, 2020, just a year after the Boston biotech posted positive Phase III results showing that people with two F508del mutations experienced statistically significant improvements in lung function after a 4-week regimen of VX-445, tezacaftor and ivacaftor. After reviewing 24-week data among patients with one F508del mutation and one minimal function mutation — and thoroughly comparing the VX-445 triple with another combo featuring VX-659 on scores like safety, drug-drug interactions, and photosensitivity — Vertex ultimately went with VX-445.

Just a few weeks after bagging $80 million in a deal to collaborate with Gingko Bioworks on its special blend of engineered bacteria used for “living therapeutics,” little Synlogic in Boston $SYBX is tossing one of its two clinical programs after watching an early-stage study go down in defeat.

Their Phase Ib/IIa study for SYNB1020 to counter the accumulation of ammonia in the body, a condition called hyperammonemia or urea cycle disorder, floundered at the interim readout, forcing the biotech to kill it and reserve its cash for pipeline therapies with greater potential.

Last week, Elanco explicitly dodged answering questions about its rumored interest in Bayer’s animal health business in its post-earnings call. On Tuesday, the Eli Lilly spinoff disclosed it was purchasing the German drug maker’s veterinary unit in a cash-and-stock deal worth $7.6 billion. 

Elanco $ELAN has been busy on the deal-making front. In April, it laid out plans to swallow its partner, Kansas-based pet therapeutics company Aratana $PETX. A July report by Reuters suggested a potential Bayer deal was being explored, and Bloomberg last week said the deal was imminent, citing sources. 

Months ago, data on J&J’s $JNJ Invokana indicated the diabetes drug conferred cardiovascular (CV) benefit in patients who do and do not have preexisting CV disease. On Tuesday, AstraZeneca’s $AZN rival treatment, Farxiga, was shown to cut the risk of CV death or the worsening of heart failure in patients with heart disease, in a landmark trial.

The treatments, in addition to Jardiance from Eli Lilly $LLY, belong to a class of diabetes drugs called sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, which work by curbing the absorption of glucose via the kidneys so that surplus glucose is excreted through urination.