MediciNova (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MNOV]]) didn’t have much of a fallback strategy last May, when the San Diego biotech reported that a mid-stage trial of bedoradrine sulfate for intravenous treatment of acute asthma attacks “did not statistically meet the primary endpoint.”
Investors responded by voting with their feet, hitting the exit in a sell-off that cut the price of MediciNova’s stock from more than $3 a share to roughly $1.50. It was a heavy blow, and the share price has been moving between $1.60 and $2 ever since.
The company, which I profiled earlier, has been trying to regroup. MediciNova executives met with the FDA in late October to discuss the steps the company must take before they can move bedoradrine forward to late-stage trials. In a statement issued late Thursday, MediciNova laid out its revised drug development strategy for bedoradrine—and said it was expanding its development efforts to include ibudilast, a potential drug for treating different types of drug addiction.
The company has been working hard to publicize its revised course, and I was briefed on the new strategy in a phone call with Michael Coffee, MediciNova’s chief business officer, and Mark Johnson, director of investor relations.
But Wall Street clearly remains skeptical. Medicinova shares closed at $1.73 in regular trading yesterday, gaining just
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.
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