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Shares in biotech Equillium (EQ) have almost tripled in Monday’s pre-market trading after the company announced that a clinical trial conducted in India by its partner Biocon demonstrated that itolizumab significantly reduced mortality in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.Equillium is currently developing itolizumab to treat severe autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. The stock is currently trading up 260% in the pre-market.Biocon also announced that the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) has granted restricted emergency use of itolizumab for the treatment of cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in COVID-19 patients with moderate to severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in India.Based on the encouraging topline results and DCGI approval, Equillium revealed that it is now planning to conduct a global randomized controlled clinical trial of itolizumab in COVID-19 patients for which it will file a U.S. investigational new drug application (IND).Biocon conducted a randomized, controlled, open-label study at four hospitals in India, enrolling a total of 30 hospitalized COVID-19 patients with moderate to...
Stock futures extended gains Monday morning after two pharmaceutical companies received “fast track” designation for their vaccine candidates for Covid-19....
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s (BABA) co-founder Jack Ma has reduced his stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant to 4.8% from 6.2% over the past year.The e-commerce platform’s 20-F annual filing released on Friday, did not provide any further details on the average selling price of the divested stake. Alibaba shares have appreciated about 40% since the company last disclosed its annual filing in June last year.Ma last year stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman to be replaced by CEO Daniel Zhang.In addition, Alibaba Executive Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai cut his stake in the company to 1.6% from 2.2% during the same period.Also on Friday, Alibaba’s Zhang presented an ambitious goal-based plan, which envisages serving more than 1 billion consumers in China and facilitating more than RMB10 trillion of consumption on the company’s platforms in the next five years.Longer-term, Zhang wants Alibaba to serve 2 billion consumers globally, create 100 million jobs and...
(Bloomberg) -- Moderna Inc.’s experimental vaccine for Covid-19 could generate sales of more than $5 billion a year, Jefferies analyst Michael Yee said, initiating the stock at a buy.A 220% surge for the stock since the start of the year has split Wall Street as to “what will happen or if the vaccine will even work, and is hugely divided on valuation,” Yee wrote in a note to clients.“We believe the Street will be surprised to the upside if the Covid-19 vaccine works, gets approved by early 2021, and there are multi-billion dollars of purchase orders from USA and around the world,” he said.With a 30,000 person late-stage study set to kick off sometime this month, Moderna’s shot leads the pack in the race to get a vaccine to the world at large as the pandemic continues to spread.Yee predicts mRNA-1273, as the inoculation is known, will get “at least” an...
According to health authorities in South Korea, one third of seriously ill Covid-19 patients showed an improvement in their condition after being treated with Gilead’s (GILD) remdesivir drug, Reuters reports.However, additional research is still required to see if the improvement was connected to something other than the antiviral drug, for instance patients’ immunity or other therapies, the authorities said.The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) deputy director Kwon Jun-wook was reporting results from an initial group of 27 patients in different hospitals.Out of the 27 patients given remdesivir, 9 saw their condition improved, 15 stayed in the same condition, and 3 patients deteriorated Kwon Jun-wook said. He added that the results had not been compared with a control group so further work was needed.Nonetheless, South Korea has already required a supply of 5,000 remdesivir treatments from Gilead in case of a second coronavirus outbreak. The company has already recorded almost...
Restaurant bankruptcies are starting to pile up....
