Shares of CBAY stock surged for a second day Friday as analysts compared CymaBay Therapeutics' experimental liver-disease treatment to rivals from Intercept Pharmaceuticals and Genfit.
The company tested its drug in patients with primary biliary cholangitis, a chronic inflammatory disease that slowly destroys the liver. After a year, the company tested levels of enzymes related to liver damage. Almost 62% of patients who received CymaBay's drug, dubbed seladelpar, saw lower enzyme levels, compared with 20% of placebo recipients.
Primary biliary cholangitis also can cause itching. But after six months of treatment, patients treated with seladelpar had a statistically significant reduction in itching vs. the placebo group. That could help differentiate CymaBay's drug from Intercept's approved medicine, Ocaliva, and another experimental drug from Genfit called elafibranor.
"We believe the statistically significant (itching) benefit should enable unique positioning of seladelpar as the only agent that explicitly addresses both the biochemical and symptomatic features of primary biliary cholangitis," Leerink Partners analyst Thomas Smith said in a note to clients.
On today's stock market, CBAY stock jumped 8.2% to close at 16.24. That follows an 8.5% gain on Thursday.
CBAY Stock: 'Near-Best Case' Results
Smith called CymaBay's results "a near-best case data set relative to expectations."
One quarter of patients reached normal enzyme levels, indicating liver damage had stopped. None of the placebo recipients reached that point.
On a nine-point scale measuring itch symptoms, seladelpar recipients had an average reduction of 3.2 points compared with just 1.7 points in the placebo group.
Bullishly for CBAY stock, there were no serious side effects related to seladelpar in the study. Side effects and patient discontinuations were consistent across patients who received the drug and those given the placebo, CymaBay said in a news release.
Smith now sees a 90% likelihood seladelpar will gain Food and Drug Administration approval, up from 80% previously. He kept his outperform rating on CBAY stock and raised his price target to 20 from 18.
Notably, CymaBay stock has a best-possible Relative Strength Rating of 99, according to IBD Digital. This puts its shares in the top 1% of all stocks when it comes to 12-month performance. On a year-to-date basis, CBAY stock has soared more than 159%.
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