Heron Therapeutics Soars on Positive Phase 2 Results

Heron Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: HRTX) is bucking the trend of a biotechs and pharmas selling off in the wake of Hillary’s tweet. In fact the company was one of those leading the health care sector in Wednesday’s session. Heron announced positive, top-line results from its Phase 2 clinical study of HTX-011 in the management of post-operative pain in patients undergoing bunionectomy.

HTX-011, which utilizes Heron’s proprietary Biochronomer drug delivery technology, is a long-acting formulation of the local anesthetic bupivacaine in a fixed-dose combination with the anti-inflammatory meloxicam. The primary and all key secondary endpoints in the study were met with a high degree of statistical significance.

There were few adverse effects from the study, and HTX-011 was generally well tolerated. The most frequent adverse events reported were headache, nausea, vomiting, erythema, cellulitis, dizziness and hypoxia, none of which were considered drug related.

Jeffrey A. Gudin, M.D., Director, Pain Management and Palliative Care, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, Englewood, NJ, said:

Although opioid analgesics are standard of care for post-operative pain management, too often they are associated with unacceptable adverse effects often prolonging hospitalization and recovery,” Thus, there is a major unmet need for a pain management treatment that can substantially reduce our dependence on post-operative opioids. The ability of HTX-011, administered once during surgery, to significantly reduce pain and the need for pain medications for three days following surgery (as compared to a control group) is truly promising.

Barry D. Quart, Pharm.D., chief executive officer of Heron, added:

At Heron, we are dedicated to the development of best-in-class medicines that can have a major impact on patients’ lives. We are very pleased with these results, and we now will turn our attention to executing on a broad-based development program designed to enable us to bring HTX-011 to the many patients undergoing a wide range of surgeries who experience significant post-operative pain.

Shares of Heron were up about 19% at $39.99 Wednesday morning. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $43.43 and a 52-week trading range of $6.51 to $42.25.

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