Investors Shrug Off Good News for Heart Patients from New Meds

Dow Jones
1小时前

This year's run in drug stocks gained vigor from new treatments for heart attacks and strokes. Maybe some of those stocks are losing wind.

At this past weekend's congress of the European Society of Cardiology, in Munich, good results came out on drugs from Amgen, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, and Crispr Therapeutics. Their shares are all lower this week.

Amgen said that its big-selling cholesterol cutter shot, Repatha, reduced deaths by 20% in a study of 12,000 patients at high risk of having their first heart attack or stroke. The stock is down 1% from Friday's close, to a Tuesday afternoon price of $432.50.

Repatha brought Amgen sales of $3 billion last year, as doctors prescribed it to patients with high levels of the artery-scarring LDL cholesterol. The drug inhibits a natural protein known as PCSK9, which keeps the liver from clearing LDL from the blood. Doctors might prescribe Repatha more widely, thanks to the new evidence of its preventive power.

Arrowhead stock is down a steeper 6% since Friday, to $83, despite showing impressive data from a Phase 3 trial of its Plozasiran, which silences a gene that raises blood levels of triglycerides.

Besides harming arteries, high triglycerides can hospitalize people by bringing on excruciatingly painful inflammations of the pancreas. Among patients with chronically high levels of those fatty particles, Arrowhead's gene-silencer cut triglycerides by 80%, and reduced acute pancreatitis attacks by a similar proportion.

Even if Arrowhead can get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by mid-2027, as it hopes, it will be playing catch-up to rival Ionis Pharmaceuticals. In June 2026, the FDA approved Ionis' Tryngolza gene-silencer for patients with severely high triglycerides. The two companies each say there will be plenty of room for the products, because the roughly one million Americans with the condition are underserved.

One other biotech company whose good news failed to lift its stock was Crispr Therapeutics. The company is one of the half-dozen start-ups that came public to commercialize the Crispr gene-editing technologies, which can permanently change our cells' DNA templates to correct harmful genes.

Crispr stock is down 7% in the last two days to $56.75, even after showing Saturday's conference attendees the excellent one-year results among 15 patients who had edits of their ANGPTL3-producing gene, which regulates blood levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides.

The patients' one-year declines in those troublemaking blood fats were even deeper than those measured 30 and 60 days after the one-time infusions of Crispr's CTX310. After a year, LDL and triglycerides fell about 50% in the patients who had received the biggest infusions of Crispr's treatment.

While the gene-editor's triglyceride reduction wasn't as deep as that shown by Ionis, Arrowhead, or the Regeneron Pharmaceuticals drug Evkeeza, the Crispr treatment cuts LDL better than those drugs. In a Monday note, H.C. Wainwright analyst Mitchell Kapoor says he'll be watching to see how competitive CTX310's triglyceride cutting proves to be.

 

应版权方要求,你需要登录查看该内容

免责声明:投资有风险,本文并非投资建议,以上内容不应被视为任何金融产品的购买或出售要约、建议或邀请,作者或其他用户的任何相关讨论、评论或帖子也不应被视为此类内容。本文仅供一般参考,不考虑您的个人投资目标、财务状况或需求。TTM对信息的准确性和完整性不承担任何责任或保证,投资者应自行研究并在投资前寻求专业建议。

热议股票

  1. 1
     
     
     
     
  2. 2
     
     
     
     
  3. 3
     
     
     
     
  4. 4
     
     
     
     
  5. 5
     
     
     
     
  6. 6
     
     
     
     
  7. 7
     
     
     
     
  8. 8
     
     
     
     
  9. 9
     
     
     
     
  10. 10