Italy’s BioXell is sitting on a very unique situation. Yesterday the company announced that its lead drug, Elocalcitol, a Vitamin D3 analog, failed to meet its primary endpoint in a Phase 2b trial in patients with overactive bladder.

The company also said that they’re scrapping their pipeline and stopping development work on BXL746, also a Vitamin D3 analog, which is being developed for post-surgical adhesions.

What’s unique is that the company has quite a bit of cash on hand: $57.3M to be exact. Given that the company is scrapping all of its pipeline, its cash burn will effectively be reduced to overhead and salaries, plus they only have about $4M in debt.

BioXell is basically a shell that has decent capitalization, just no product.

So what to do? CEO Francesco Sinigaglia had this to say about possibly going on the acquisition trail as well as suggesting LAYOFFS!! NOOOO!!!:

“Taking into account yesterday’s top-line results of our Elocalcitol Phase IIb trial in Overactive Bladder (OAB), the focus of Management is the full evaluation of all strategic options for the Company. This includes the evaluation of our internal development programmes as well as the assessment of external growth opportunities including M&A activities…our short term objective is to focus our spending very carefully and ensure strict cost control.”

So does “strict cost control” = layoffs? Who knows.

BioXell shares plunged 26 percent on the bad news. Stay tuned…

Image from didierbeck

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