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Elan shares fall on MS drug news

By Geoff Percival - Friday, March 19, 2010

ELAN, the Irish pharmaceutical company, saw its share price slip by 4c yesterday on the back of seven more cases of a rare brain disease being reported amongst users of its multiple sclerosis treatment Tysabri.

The update came from US drug company Biogen Idec, which co-owns Tysabri, and means that instances of PML – a potentially fatal brain disease which is a possible side effect of Tysabri – have risen from 35 to 42 in the four weeks up to March 10.

Elan’s Dublin share price slipped by 4c, or 0.73%, to €5.46 yesterday, on the back of that news and the announcement that Phase 3 trial results from in-research Alzheimer’s drug Bapineuzumab look set to be put back from late 2011 to the middle of 2012, mainly due to test recruitment issues.

While the PML case update is disappointing, it was fully expected by both companies, and is still well within the one case per 1,000 Tysabri users risk ratio as set out on the product’s labelling.

The geographic split of the latest PML cases were weighted outside of the US – with 15 instances there, 24 in the EU and three "elsewhere".

Tysabri’s performance has been good of late – last year, the drug’s sales grew by 30%, helping to boost Elan’s 2009 group revenue by 11% to $1.1 billion (€0.8bn).

Elan’s management has done away with fixed patient number targets, after scrapping its original forecasts of reaching the 100,000 patient mark by the end of this year.

Some industry insiders have suggested current growth levels could result in Elan actually reaching that user figure by the end of 2013.

In total, nine Tysabri users have died after contracting PML – roughly 21% of all cases.

Analysts were, yesterday, making note of the monthly rise – seven cases being reported in March against four during the previous four weeks.

"The increase in PML cases is expected, but we have to await the reaction of regulators as the incidence in patients on the drug over 18 infusions increases," commented Ian Hunter of Goodbody Stockbrokers.

That statement refers to the rise of PML instances among people taking Tysabri for more than a year and a half and those using it for more than two years.

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