Short candidate: Endocyte (ECYT). History of data distortion. Inlicensed a "phase 3 ready" radioligand for prostate cancer, which has shaky P2 data. Exploratory endpoints, retrospective analysis of cherry picked patients, etc. The P3 will not read out for some time. But the act of inlicensing this drug has caused a huge run up in recent days, about 250% this week. ECYT would be stupid not to go for some dilution. They are going to need the money, and they're not going to get a partner. They may not need it soon, though; they've got somewhere round $100 left after the upfront. Seems like a natural to front run a secondary here, but they may not do it as fast as some have recently. Thus a straight short seems better than an options play.
See German Multicenter Study Investigating 177Lu-PSMA-617 Radioligand Therapy in Advanced Prostate Cancer Patients
h/t to twitter's bio-clouseau, who highlighted this portion: "The major limitation of this study is its retrospective nature. Data were collected in 12 therapy centers, which caused inho- mogeneity of available data in terms of follow-up timeline and concomitant medication. Data might be biased by patient selection, loss of follow-up, and undocumented adverse events. Therefore, all inferential statistics are intended to be exploratory (hypotheses generating, as a limitation in all retrospective studies), not confirmatory, and are interpreted accordingly."
I don't think I've ever seen such caveats in a paper before. The ECYT press release does not highlight that . . .
Cheers, Tuck |
