Nek­tar Ther­a­peu­tics is blaz­ing a come­back trail for a drug it once worked on with Eli Lil­ly, trum­pet­ing pos­i­tive Phase 2b da­ta on Tues­day that Wall Street found ex­cep­tion­al.

Nek­tar said rezpe­galdesleukin, com­mon­ly known as rezpeg, hit its pri­ma­ry end­point in mod­er­ate-to-se­vere atopic der­mati­tis, achiev­ing sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance on all three dose lev­els test­ed. Rezpeg al­so hit each of its key sec­ondary end­points.

The com­pa­ny's stock price NK­TR more than dou­bled in ear­ly Tues­day trad­ing be­fore set­tling to about an 85% in­crease af­ter the open­ing bell.

The read­out rep­re­sents a re­sus­ci­ta­tion for the rezpeg pro­gram and more broad­ly for Nek­tar, whose shares en­ter­ing Tues­day were down more than 97% in the last five years. The pos­i­tive da­ta al­so drew ques­tions from an­a­lysts in a call Tues­day morn­ing about whether rezpeg could com­pete with es­tab­lished im­munol­o­gy drugs like Re­gen­eron and Sanofi’s Dupix­ent.

Rev­o­lu­tion Med­i­cines has signed a “flex­i­ble fund­ing agree­ment” with Roy­al­ty Phar­ma for up to $2 bil­lion that should sup­port it through late-stage de­vel­op­ment of its lead RAS in­hibitor and be­yond.

The deal con­sists of two parts — a so-called syn­thet­ic roy­al­ty agree­ment worth up to $1.25 bil­lion and a debt fa­cil­i­ty worth up to $750 mil­lion.

Un­like tra­di­tion­al li­cens­ing deals be­tween phar­ma and biotech com­pa­nies, the “cus­tomized fund­ing so­lu­tion” al­lows Rev­o­lu­tion to main­tain con­trol of its clin­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ties while cap­tur­ing the po­ten­tial val­ue of its pipeline, Roy­al­ty Phar­ma CEO Pablo Legor­re­ta said in a Tues­day re­lease.

Rev­o­lu­tion has re­moved end date guid­ance for its cash run­way in light of the part­ner­ship. In March, the com­pa­ny re­port­ed $2.1 bil­lion in cash and equiv­a­lents, which should sup­port it through the sec­ond half of 2027.

Plus, news about Rivus, Amarin, Recor­dati, Liq­uidia, Health­care Roy­al­ty, Lex­eo, Per­cep­tive, ven­Bio, No­vo Nordisk and Cidara:

Ar­riVent to start an­oth­er Phase 3 of lung can­cer drug: In a Phase 1b tri­al, the Penn­syl­va­nia biotech is study­ing its EGFR drug fir­mon­er­tinib in pa­tients with non-small cell lung can­cer with spe­cif­ic mu­ta­tions called EGFR PACC. Ar­riVent re­port­ed that a 240 mg dose of fir­mon­er­tinib kept the dis­ease at bay for a me­di­an of 16 months when used as a first-line op­tion. In pa­tients whose dis­ease had spread to the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem, 7 out of 17 par­tic­i­pants ex­pe­ri­enced a com­plete re­sponse.

Ar­riVent is de­vel­op­ing its tar­get­ed can­cer drug for un­com­mon EGFR mu­ta­tions. It’s al­ready study­ing fir­mon­er­tinib in a Phase 3 tri­al in pa­tients with ex­on 20 in­ser­tion mu­ta­tions, and said Tues­day that it plans to be­gin en­rolling an­oth­er Phase 3 tri­al for pa­tients with PACC mu­ta­tions in the sec­ond half of the year. — Lei Lei Wu