Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX) Soars 140% on Bristol Meyers Acquisition

Tallahassee, FL 1/912 (StreetBeat) -- Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) agreed late on Saturday to buy Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX), a maker of a hepatitis C treatment, for about $2.5 billion in cash, as major drug companies seek to bolster their pipelines with more profitable specialty products.

Under the deal, Bristol-Myers will pay $26 a share through a two-step merger, beginning with a tender offer. That represents a huge 163 percent premium over Inhibitex’s closing price Friday.

“The acquisition of Inhibitex builds on Bristol-Myers Squibb’s long history of discovering, developing and delivering innovative new medicines in virology and enriches our portfolio of investigational medicines for hepatitis C,” Lamberto Andreotti, chief executive of Bristol-Myers, said in a statement.

Many big pharmaceutical companies have turned to mergers in recent years to plug holes in their drug pipelines, in large part to replace products that are set to face generic competition. Such companies are turning increasingly to smaller biopharmaceutical players developing specialized — and therefore hard to replicate — treatments.

In Inhibitex, Bristol-Myers will buy a company focused on antiviral products. Its main drug, INX-189, is an oral medicine being developed for hepatitis C that the company hopes will form the basis for simpler treatments of the disease.

Yet the deal is an expensive bet by Bristol-Myers, which says it expects the takeover to hurt its profitability for the next four years. Its earnings are expected to fall by 4 cents a share this year and 5 cents a share next year.

Inhibitex has not proved profitable lately, reporting annual losses from 2008 through 2010. For the quarter ended Sept. 30, the company, based in Alpharetta, Ga., reported a $5.3 million loss atop $1.3 million in revenue.

Bristol-Myers has said it plans to finance its bid by drawing upon its cash hoard. Shareholders owning about 17 percent of Inhibitex’s stock have already agreed to support the merger.

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Inhibitex Reports Clinical Developments, Trading +17%

Palm Beach, FL 11/29/11 (StreetBeat) --Inhibitex, Inc. (NASDAQ:INHX) today announced several recent clinical and corporate developments, including top-line safety and antiviral data from its ongoing clinical trial designed to evaluate additional doses of INX-189, an oral nucleotide polymerase inhibitor being developed to treat chronic infections caused by hepatitis C virus (HCV), administered as monotherapy or in combination with ribavirin (RBV) for seven days.

“We believe the significant increase in antiviral activity demonstrated with 100 mg INX-189 in combination with RBV, as compared to 100 mg INX-189 dosed as monotherapy, further confirms the antiviral synergy between INX-189 and RBV that we have consistently observed in preclinical and clinical results to-date,” stated Dr. Joseph Patti, Senior Vice President and CSO of Inhibitex, Inc. “We look forward to further exploring this antiviral synergy with 200 mg of INX-189 and expanding the scope of our ongoing and planned Phase 2 clinical trials to include interferon-free combinations of INX-189 with other antiviral agents in HCV genotype 1, 2, and 3 patients in 2012.”

Recent Corporate Developments
INX-189 for Chronic Hepatitis C – The Company today reported top-line safety and antiviral data from an ongoing Phase 1b extension trial of INX-189, which is designed to further evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and antiviral activity of various doses of INX-189, administered as monotherapy or in combination with RBV, for seven days in treatment-naïve patients infected with chronic HCV genotype 1. In the ongoing trial, 100 mg INX-189, dosed once-daily for seven days in combination with RBV, continued to demonstrate potent and dose-dependent synergistic antiviral activity with a median HCV RNA reduction from baseline of -3.79 log10 IU/mL.

Further, 100 mg INX-189 in combination with RBV was well tolerated and there were no serious adverse events. For comparison purposes, in a clinical trial completed earlier this year, 100 mg INX-189 dosed as monotherapy once-daily for seven days resulted in a median -2.53 log10 IU/mL reduction in HCV RNA levels. In this same clinical trial, the Company also reported antiviral data indicating that INX-189, when dosed once-daily at 9 and 25 mg in combination with RBV for seven days, demonstrated dose-dependent, synergistic antiviral activity.

The Company also reported today that, subject to regulatory review, it plans to further expand its ongoing Phase 1b extension trial to evaluate once-daily doses of 200 mg INX-189 in combination with RBV; 300 mg INX-189 as monotherapy; and 200 mg INX-005 (a single isomer of INX-189) as monotherapy, respectively, for seven days. The Company anticipates that the Phase 1b extension trial will be completed in the first quarter of 2012.

Additionally, the Company reported that it plans to submit a protocol amendment this quarter to its ongoing Phase 2 study in genotype 2 and 3 HCV-infected patients to include the evaluation of 100 mg and 200 mg of INX-189 dosed once-daily in combination with RBV for 12 weeks.

Financing Activity – The Company reported today that it had recently sold a total of 1,949,015 shares of common stock at an average price per share of $10.25 for total gross proceeds of $19,983,396 through its at-the-market (ATM) financing vehicle. The Company entered into a $20 million ATM financing arrangement with McNicoll, Lewis & Vlak LLC (MLV) in November 2010, which provides it the opportunity to sell registered shares into the open market through MLV from time-to-time under its effective shelf registration. After commissions, the Company received $19,383,274 in net proceeds. The intended use of the net proceeds is to support the expansion of the Company’s planned Phase 2 program for INX-189 in 2012 and for general corporate purposes.

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Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX) Shares Continue to Climb

Tallahassee, FL 11/7/11 (StreetBeat) --Shares of Inhibitex Inc. (Nasdaq; INHX) continued to climb Monday in premarket trading as analysts touted the potential of its possible treatment for Hepatitis C.

The drug developer on Friday had said that early study data showed that a 200-milligram dose of its drug, called INX-189, did well in reducing the virus in patients. The treatment was well tolerated, with no serious side effects, when given to patients with a certain form of chronic hepatitis who have not been treated. The drug was administered for seven days.

Shares had more than doubled on Friday, and added nearly 14 percent, or $1.17, to $9.71 on Monday before markets opened.

The drug showed impressive potency when delivered at a higher dose, and that plus the lack of safety issues so far puts the potential treatment "in a league with the big boys," said Baird analyst Thomas J. Russo in a research note. He raised his price target on the stock to $12 from $6.

Canaccord analyst George Farmer, in a separate note, raised his price target on the stock to $15 from $7 based on the increasing likelihood of INX-189 becoming a successful treatment of all hepatitis C genotypic variants.

Inhibitex, which is based in, Alpharetta, Ga., focuses on developing treatments for viral infections and does not have any products on the market. Hepatitis C is expected to become a larger public health problem as baby boomers get older.

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Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX) Shares Soar as Investors See Another Pharmasset in the Making

Tallahassee, FL 11/4/11 (StreetBeat) -- Shares of Inhibitex (Nasdaq: INHX) more than doubled Friday morning after the company released promising new data on its hepatitis C drug candidate.

The Inhibitex drug INX-189 belongs to the same "nucleoside" class of potent oral hepatitis C drugs as Pharmasset's (Nasdaq: VRUS) heralded PSI-7977. The difference, of course, is that Inhibitex's market value is $300 million, or at least it was going into Friday's trading. Pharmasset's market value is close to $6 billion.

Investors are hoping that the magical Hep C pixie dust that has made Pharmasset the best-performing biotech stock this year will work its charms on Inhibitex as well.

Inhibitex shares soared 133% to $9.25 in pre-market trading after the company reported a 4.25 log drop in Hep C viral load after 7 days of treatment with a 200mg dose of INX-189 in treatment-naive patients. No serious adverse events were reported. That result is comparable to the viral load decline demonstrated by Pharmasset's PSI-7977 in an earlier study.

Nucleoside or "nucs" have become the belles of the Hep C drug ball because of their potential as a backbone of future all-oral combination Hep C therapy. Pharmasset's nuc PSI-7977 has garnered the most attention, but companies like Inhibitex and Idenix Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: IDIX) are also developing their own Hep C nucs.

Pharmasset shares were down 4% to $74.80 in early Friday trading, likely due to competitive concerns stemming from the INX-189 data. In Friday's release, Inhibitex said it was moving forward with new studies of INX-189 including one in combination with an another undisclosed direct-acting antiviral Hep C drug.

The new Inhibitex data on INX-189 comes on the eve of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD) annual meeting, which will feature important presentations of new hepatitis C drug research.

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Inhibitex (INHX) Technical Stock Chart Video

The Inhibitex stock chart could be an inverted head and shoulders in the making. The pps is sitting on support at this point and possibly making the right shoulder. Technical traders will be watching for this support level to hold with resistance in the upper-$3.60's.

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