Biotech Values

[mcbio]

Re: ACHN pipeline

Their pipeline indicates they have other early stage HCV candidates to spend the money on. Their HIV and bacterial infection drugs are essentially dead aren't they? If they restart one or more of the dormant drugs the cash from the offering may not last that long.

ACHN has indicated before that they don't expect to spend another dime on the HIV or bacterial infection drug; they hope to partner those based on clinical and pre-clinical data, respectively, to date. That was of course before they raised $20M in cash, but I still expect their prior guidance to remain for the non-HCV candidates as HCV is ACHN's primary focus.

The cash raise does now give ACHN sufficient funds to comfortably advance ACH-1095, the NS4A antagonist, into Phase 1 pending FDA clearance. I still think ACH-1095 is interesting because NS4A is a novel target and ACH-1095 may be the only NS4A HCV drug in development, or at least the furthest along in development. ACHN will have to demonstrate in the clinic that ACH-1095 is effective in humans at doses that don't cause the pre-clinical cardiac tox issues seen in rats at high doses (#msg-40422840 ) in order to get GILD to opt back in to the program, but there is clearly still that potential (#msg-42336012 ).

Also, ACHN is in the early stages of development of another class of HCV drugs, but they have not offered any specific detail yet on this class of HCV drugs. ACHN has previously indicated that they will disclose more details about this program during 1H10 after additional pre-clinical tox studies are completed.

So, bottom-line is to expect the cash just raised to be spent on further development of ACH-1095, the remaining Phase 1b studies for ACH-1625, and the undisclosed class of HCV drugs for certain. ACHN will also spend their cash on Phase 2 studies for ACH-1625 if they can't land a partnership.