It’s a minor win in the greater scheme of things, but Nastech got a bit of good news today. It has received a key patent related to its Peptide YY nasal spray, which the Bothell company is testing out as an anti-obesity treatment.
In response, Nastech’s stock rose nearly 6.5 percent to $13.02 today. Here’s the raw press release that went out about the new patent: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060725/nytu042.html?.v=62.
The question being debated again among the investors who hang out at the Nastech stock message board, http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/mb/NSTK, is whether PYY is the real deal. After all, would Merck &Co. really have given up on something as potentially lucrative as an anti-obesity nasal spray if there were solid signs it worked?
One message board poster points to this online medical article, http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/54/5/1264, which indicates that when PYY gets into the central nervous system, it actually can increase one’s food intake. It has the opposite effect when it’s in the circulatory system.
Nastech said, when Merck pulled out of its partnership on the drug, that it thinks PYY still holds promise. And the company has submitted a new drug application for it. The clinical trials that will tell us for sure or not are still coming.
Less than two weeks, of course, Nastech’s stock fell significantly when word came down that the FDA had rejected its application for calcitonin-salmon spray, a generic drug to treat osteoporosis. I was off from blogging then, but the story can be found here, http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/06/07/14/100bus_nastech001.cfm.
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