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Biotech / Medical : Cell Therapeutics (CTIC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Icebrg who wrote (253)	7/28/2004 5:21:04 AM
From: Icebrg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 946

Cell Therapeutics slashing expenses to stem red ink By Luke Timmerman Seattle Times business reporter Cell Therapeutics said yesterday it is cutting $15 million from its 2004 expenses to keep from running too deeply into the red while it awaits testing results on its leading cancer-drug candidate. The Seattle biotech company said the cuts won't delay its hoped-for introduction of the drug, Xyotax, to the market next year. The company will delay some clinical drug trials, put off some new initiatives and trim some administrative and travel costs. In the year's first half, the company has spent $94 million on operations. One expense issue that did not come up in a conference call with analysts was whether Chief Executive James Bianco has repaid an overdue $3.5 million loan to the company. Cell Therapeutics did not respond to requests for comment after the conference call, but Bianco vowed in May to repay the loan soon. Cell Therapeutics is in belt-tightening mode, with about $90 million in cash at the end of June. The company renewed its forecast that it will lose $118 million to $127 million this year. During the conference call, Bianco made the financial squeeze sound temporary. He also said spending will naturally decline in the second half of the year, now that the company has finished the expensive work of enrolling patients in its Xyotax lung-cancer trials. The company is trying to raise money by selling 8 million more shares of stock. The stock closed yesterday at $5.05, down 42 percent this year. Some investors dislike secondary offerings because they dilute the value of existing shares. But Bianco said he hoped the offering could raise enough cash to run the company through 2005, when it expects to start selling Xyotax. He said the company needs to keep investing in preparations for selling the cancer drug. "Raising money on a 52-week low is not ideal, but then again, neither is cutting back on the pre-launch activities of a potential blockbuster drug like Xyotax," Bianco said on the call. Xyotax takes the active ingredient in one of the world's top-selling cancer drugs and packages it with a polymer to reduce side effects. The trial was designed to see if Xyotax, compared with standard treatments, can extend the lives of severely sick lung-cancer patients who are expected to live only four to five months. Even though no clinical trial results are in yet and company scientists don't have access to the detailed data, Bianco said Xyotax appears to be prolonging lives. More than four or five months have passed since the last patient enrolled in the trial, and only 201 of the 370 patients have died as of this month, so Bianco reasons the drug is apparently working. But he also cautioned the results will not really be known and statistically analyzed until early 2005. Some analysts are skeptical about how well the drug is working. David Miller, an analyst with Biotech Monthly, said there could be other explanations for patients living longer. They may not have been quite as sick as their diagnosis indicated, or all the patients were getting better-than-usual care in a clinical trial, Miller said. seattletimes.nwsource.com [Timmerman is wrong about the medium survival times. They do exceed 7 months as the trial was fully enrolled in November last year and the medium survival was reached sometimes between mid-June and mid-July. And when all the data has been run through the computers, it may even become longer as not all patients were enrolled during November of last year. The bulk of the recruitments did however take place relatively late in the trial (between August and November) Erik].