Polyphor's battered stock rises 50% as project gets journal attention

Spexis AG

24/10/2019 09:24

** Swiss biotech Polyphor's  POLN.S  shares rise 50%
following a publication in the journal Nature describing how the
company's newer class of antibiotics targeting multi-resistant
bacteria was discovered
    ** Polyphor shares have been battered -- they had been down
by around two-thirds since Jan. 1, and nearly 80% off their
post-IPO high in 2018 -- after its main antibiotic candidate,
murepavadin, showed the risk of kidney injury, forcing a
clinical trial to be scrapped  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL5N25V0XV
    ** The Nature report describes how Polyphor's Outer Membrane
Protein Targeting Antibiotics (OMPTA), the class of antibiotics
to which murepavadin belongs, works
    ** In addition to working on an inhaled version of
murepavadin it hopes will be safer, Polyphor said this week it
has another OMPTA molecule, POL7306, in pre-clinical development
that it eventually hopes to deploy against multi-resistant
Gram-negative bacteria 
    ** Zuercher Kantonalbank analyst Michael Nawrath said on
Thursday that an article in a high-impact journal like Nature
article is nice, in particular in science circles, but that it
is not validation for whether an OMPTA molecule can be developed
and put to clinical use in a tolerable form for humans
    ** "The toxic side effects of the one-time lead product
underscores the problem, which was why Polyphor suffered such a
massive setback," Nawrath said in a note 

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