Shares of the Canadian biopharmaceutical company working on an Ebola virus treatment — which soared 66 percent in recent days — are cooling off Monday morning.
Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, which is developing TKM-Ebola under a $140 million contract with the Department of Defense, saw its shares spike to $16.70 in the first 20 minutes of trading — that’s up 66.5 percent from its closing price of $10.13 just five trading sessions before.
But then Tekmira shares did an about-face and fell to $13.86 in the next 50 minutes.
In the late morning, they stood at $14.05, down 1.3 percent in very heaving trading.
Despite mainly positive drug trials, the testing of Tekmira’s TKM-Ebola was placed on hold in July by the Food and Drug Administration and it likely won’t be removed from regulatory hold status until the end of the year, Jason Kolbert, head of health care research at Maxim Group, wrote in a report last week.
Tekmira had been testing its Ebola treatment in animals — and it had been having success.
“TKM-Ebola protected 100 percent of the non-human primates previously infected with lethal doses of Zaire Ebola virus,” Kolbert wrote in his report, citing a report in Lancet, a medical journal.
“The 100 percent efficacy has not previously been shown with any other treatment,” Kolbert noted in his report.
The analyst has a buy recommendation on Tekmira with a 12-month price target of $23.00.