Today a tiny biotech company caught the attention of the investment community as it’s shares skyrocketed on Wednesday and became the most traded stock on the NASDAQ.
Bio-Path Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: BPTH) jumped over 185 percent in today’s trading session after the company announced an update to its Phase 2 trial date on its drug, prexigebersen. Overall, the results were positive on both the effectiveness and the safety of the medication, successfully treating difficult illnesses with a much greater degree of success than conventional drugs.
The trial in question enrolled 17 patients and looked and how well Bio-Path’s drug worked in combination with another compound, cytarabine, which is used for patients who don’t or can’t be treated with intense chemotherapy. Overall, the results showed around 29 percent of patients had complete remission. In comparison, patients who just took cytarabine without prexigebersen had remission rates between 7-13 percent.
“These updated interim data from Stage 1 of our Phase 2 study of prexigebersen in de novo AML patients give strong evidence of the safety and efficacy profile of our lead compound and underscore its potential to provide meaningful treatment improvement in this difficult-to-treat patient population,” said Peter Nielsen, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bio-Path in a press release. “We were particularly pleased with these results, especially when you consider that the large percentage of these patients are secondary AML patients. The CR/CRp/CRi rate for LDAC treatment alone for the class of patients in this study was benchmarked at 7-13% , whereas prexigebersen treatment with LDAC is currently showing a 29% CR/CRi/MLFS rate, with a highly favorable safety profile.”
The company already had positive results before, so many were expecting that this update would also be positive as well. Bio-Path also mentioned that over two-thirds of the patients in the trial had acute myeloid leukemia, a notoriously difficult illness to treat and a fact that wasn’t known by investors. Overall, the company believes it now has a viable plan to register the drug for wider scale use and anticipates a third clinical trial to take place in the future, something that traders will be keeping an eye out for.
In response to the news, share prices of Bio-Path jumped from $4.62 this morning all the way up to $13.44, before settling at the $12 point. Back on March 1st, the company tripled in stock price again, jumping from $2.65 to $7.71 in a single day. Small biotech company’s naturally respond wildly to news announcements, with momentum traders particularly enjoying these stocks for their massive swings in price.
Bio-Path Holdings Company Profile
Bio-Path is a biotechnology company developing DNAbilize®, a novel technology that has yielded a pipeline of RNAi nanoparticle drugs that can be administered with a simple intravenous transfusion. Bio-Path’s lead product candidate, prexigebersen (BP1001, targeting the Grb2 protein), is in a Phase 2 study for blood cancers and in preclinical studies for solid tumors. This is followed by BP1002, targeting the Bcl-2 protein, which the company anticipates entering into clinical studies where it will be evaluated in lymphoma and solid tumors. – Bio-Path Holdings