Friday’s Top BioHealth Movers (ACOR, AVNR, CXM, LXRX, SVNT, SQNM, SPPI)

October 9, 2009 · Filed Under Financial, daily, fda 

This has been a quiet trading day, but not in the land of biotech and medical technologies that comprise the BioHealth sector.  These are this morning’s top movers in the group:

Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: ACOR) is down over 15% after the FDA made public the background material over Acorda’s Fampridine.  Full data can be found at:

AVANIR Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVNR) is up 6.5% at $2.45 and it was one of the top gainers this morning, but has since come off of highs of $2.68.  The company announced additional detailed results from the confirmatory double-blind Phase III STAR trial evaluating two doses of the investigational drug Zenvia™ in the treatment of pseudobulbar affect among patients with underlying multiple sclerosis (MS) or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Zenvia met the primary efficacy endpoint by reducing PBA episode rates by an incremental 11.9% beyond placebo. The lower dose Zenvia group did not achieve a statistically significant reduction in PBA episode rates compared to placebo.

Cardium Therapeutics Inc. (AMEX: CXM) is one of the top winners of all stocks today with a 19% gain to $1.82.  This one is set to make a presentation soon, but the move today appears to be based upon a positive recommendation from a boutique firm called Skymark Research.

Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: LXRX) is getting tooled after a secondary offering.  The company sold some 33,333,333 shares of common stock at $1.50 per share after a $1.77 close yesterday.  We have shares down about 13% at $1.53.  It turns out that 19,894,076 shares are being offered through the underwriters and 13,439,257 shares are being offered to Invus, L.P., Lexicon’s largest stockholder.

Savient Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: SVNT) is seeing a surprise 7% gain to $14.28 this morning.  This is surprising considering that its secondary offering of 4.3 million shares priced at $13.29.  One item helping more is that this stock was also Raised to Outperform over at Oppenheimer.

Sequenom Inc. (NASDAQ: SQNM) is running again on no news and is up another 9.8% at $3.67 today.  Traders keep touting that there may be no intentional wrongdoing from management and the recently fired staffers.  This is still very much an at-risk company, although making any predictions at this point would be based entirely upon incomplete data that still has many unknowns.

Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPPI) is down some 17% at $5.12 after it received a complete response letter from FDA for FUSILEV in advanced metastatic colorectal cancer noting that it did not demonstrate that FUSILEV is non-inferior to leucovorin.  The response also recommended that it meet with them to discuss options for continuing to seek approval of FUSILEV in advanced metastatic colorectal cancer.

JON C. OGG

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