Oncolytics Biotech Down 35% At Opening On Pfizer News
Dow Jones Newswires
By Andy Georgiades
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
TORONTO -- Shares of Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (ONCY) are down 46% Friday after it announced that its pact with Pfizer Inc. (PFE) was terminated, but at least one analyst said he's "hanging tight."
Late Thursday, Oncolytics said its agreement with Pfizer to develop the reovirus as an animal healthcare product has ended and that clinical studies for veterinary use wouldn't be pursued.
"There's a basic tenet in science that you never try and translate what happens in animals to what happens in humans," Allen Davidoff, analyst at Lightyear Capital Inc., told Dow Jones. "Oncolytics in general has always been really committed to the human side," Davidoff said.
Davidoff said that he's not "in any way" concerned from a scientific standpoint, adding that interim Phase I results in humans for reolysin, the company's potential cancer drug, were great.
"They're going forward into their Phase II trials, they've got the money to do that," he said.
In Toronto Friday, Oncolytics is down C$2.90 to C$3.35 on about 396,000 shares. SYNSORB Biotech Inc. (SYBB), which owns 6.3 million shares of Oncolytics, is down 15 Canadian cents to 42 Canadian cents.
Company Web Site: oncolyticsbiotech.com
Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (ONCY), based in Calgary, said the news from Pfizer Inc. (PFE) came as a surprise and was disappointing, but its human program will proceed unchanged.
"There's no information that we got from Pfizer to make us change our human development program," company spokesman Wayne Schnarr said. "We've looked at the data that they've been generating and we have seen nothing in their data concerning safety or efficacy that raises any concerns about the development of our product for the human area."
Referring to the company's pummeled share price, Schnarr said that, whenever a corporate partner "walks away from a deal," the market reacts - and in this particular it overreacted.
"The human health potential for the reovirus as a cancer treatment is many, many times larger than the potential in the animal healthcare area," he said.
The reovirus is a naturally occurring human virus that, according to some research, has been found to seek out and destroy cancer cells when injected into tumors.
Full Phase I results, which showed some form of tumor response in six out of 12 patients and no adverse events, will be released at a conference in mid-May, Schnarr said. But Phase II clinical trials will begin well before that.
He noted that Oncolytics, which burns about C$600,000 a month, has enough cash to see it though to the end of 2003.
Schnarr said Pfizer didn't provide a reason for terminating the agreement. Officials from Pfizer weren't immediately available for comment. |
