Cypress Bioscience Shares Soar on News of FDA Approval

Cypress Bioscience (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYPB]]) shares are up sharply today after the San Diego drug developer and its New York partner announced last night the Food and Drug Administration approved their drug for fibromyalgia. As Luke reported in October, Cypress started down this path in 2001, when it licensed rights to milnacipran, (Salvella) a drug approved outside the U.S. for depression.

Cypress’ stock gained more than $1.90, or 27 percent, and was trading at over $9 a share in the late morning. Its strategic partner, New York’s Forest Laboratories (NYSE: [[ticker:FRX]]) was up $1.10, or 4.5 percent, and trading above $25.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain and decreased physical function, afflicting as many as six million people in the United States. Cypress decided to test the drug for fibromyalgia because of the way it’s designed to block the reaborption of serotonin and norepinephrine, two pain-and-mood signaling chemicals in the brain.

The FDA’s approval of milnacipran (Savella) is a key validation for a strategic change in direction that Cypress CEO Jay Kranzler made in 2001, when Cypress licensed the drug from a French drug company. Cypress formed a strategic partnership around the drug in 2004 with Forest Laboratories, which contributed cash, clinical-trials and regulatory expertise, and marketing expertise.

Kranzler’s move expanded Cypress’s focus beyond developing drugs for treating rheumatoid arthritis, the firm’s original area of expertise. After acquiring Proprius Pharmaceuticals last year, Cypress said it had broadened its capabilities further to provide personalized medicine testing services to help rheumatologists optimize therapies for treating ailments like rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.