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There is no approved cure or treatment for Huntington’s disease.
The time of dreams
Actions of
Ionis Pharmaceuticals
were down about 20% in pre-market trade after the biotech company announced it was halting a Phase 3 trial of an investigational treatment for Huntington’s disease called tominersen.
Ionis (ticker: IONS) said that
Roche Holding
(RHHBY), with which he is developing the drug, has stopped dosing the trial patients following an independent review by an independent data monitoring committee of the “benefit / risk profile for study participants” .
Ionis said there were no new security concerns, but had little information on the details behind the Data Watch Committee’s review.
“We, again, haven’t seen any of the data,” Ionis CEO Brett Monia said on an investor call Monday night. “Based on this recommendation, Roche made the decision it took.”
Huntington’s disease is a fatal brain disease with no cure or approved treatment. “This is of course not the outcome we are working towards or hoping for, as we have become quite close to the HD patient community over the years,” Monia said in a statement.
While at least one analyst reduced their price target on Ionis after the announcement, others said many investors had already written off the tominersen program and its failure came as no surprise.
In a note released Monday evening, SVB analyst Leerink Mani Foroohar reduced his price target on Ionis to $ 36 from $ 50. The stock closed Monday at $ 55.64. Foroohar assesses the performance of the stock market. He wrote that he previously expected about $ 330 million in “off-year probability-weighted” royalties for the treatment of Huntington’s disease with tominersen.
Evercore ISI analyst Josh Schimmer, on the other hand, wrote late Monday that he had already removed the program from his financial model and also encouraged investors to do so. “While IONS is surprised and retains some optimism for the program, this sentiment is not shared by us or most investors,” Schimmer wrote. “The only real surprise is the number of shares sold after the close, even if the volume is low.”
Cowen analyst Yaron Werber wrote that he saw no implications for other Ionis programs stemming from the Huntington’s disease failure. “Expectations were low for the high-risk program, but a sell-off of around 20% is likely and removes a key overhang before several paltry reads to come,” he wrote.
Werber wrote that while expectations for the drug were low, potential sales were substantial. He said the lower price on the stock now provides a “solid entry point” ahead of the results of a number of trials, including two Phase 2 studies of a drug called IONIS-AGT-LRx. in hypertension, among others.
Werber rates the stock outperformance and has no price target.
Shares of Ionis had fallen 1.6% so far this year and 33.8% in the past 12 months.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
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