Precious Metals

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>>> ContraFect down 37% on mid-stage exebacase data


Seeking Alpha

Jan. 7, 2019

By: Douglas W. House, SA News Editor


https://seekingalpha.com/news/3421090-contrafect-37-percent-mid-stage-exebacase-data


Thinly traded nano cap ContraFect (CFRX -36.6%) is down on almost a 5x surge in volume following its announcement of Phase 2 data on exebacase (CF-301) for the treatment Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) bacteremia including endocarditis.

Treatment with exebacase, a recombinant form of an enzyme called lysin, added to standard-of-care antibiotics resulted in a clinically meaningful improvement in response rate at day 14 compared to antibiotics alone, but the separation appeared to fall short of statistical significance. Specifically, the response rate in the exebacase cohort was 70.4% versus 60.0% for antibiotics alone.

The company says exebacase produced statistically significant treatment effects in methicillin-resistant S. aureus patients and in those with bacteremia alone.

On the safety front, the rate of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) was 88.9% for exebacase compared to 85.1% for antibiotics alone. The rates of serious TEAEs were 47.2% and 51.1%, respectively.

Exebacase acts by targeting a certain area of the cell wall that is essential to the bacterium, making it less likely to develop resistance.

A Phase 3 trial is next up.

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