With its sole remaining asset having failed to even enter the clinic, Ampio Pharmaceuticals has decided to call it a day.
Expecting its stock to soon fall foul of the NYSE stock exchange’s requirements, Ampio’s leadership is bowing to the inevitable and voluntarily delisting the shares. This will avoid the “significant operating expense” of remaining on the exchange and being compliant with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting requirements.
“The board has determined that it is in the company’s best interests that the company take steps designed to ensure sufficient cash to adequately fund an orderly wind down of the company’s operations and to maximize the company’s cash position,” Ampio said in a March 25 release.
The biotech’s stock was soaring at close to $500 per share back in September 2021 but has nosedived over the subsequent two years as the company hit one clinical obstacle after another. Multiple attempts to develop the osteoarthritis drug Ampion for COVID-19 ultimately failed, leading the biotech to lay off all but five employees by early 2023.
The company has been mulling strategic options for almost two years now, but it was the failure of OA-201 last month that marked the end of the road. While the small molecule formulation showed promise in smaller preclinical studies when its ability to reduce pain and preserve knee cartilage was compared to saline, Ampio revealed in February that the drug had proven unable to reduce pain caused by osteoarthritis in a larger set of animal studies.
That sent the company’s plans to file for an investigational new drug application next year out the window and, with them, Ampio’s last-ditch effort to develop a product. With no backup option left in the pipeline, Ampio said at the time that its board was “assessing both internal and external options.”
In an SEC filing yesterday, the biotech confirmed that the decision to delist from the NYSE and wind down the company had been made once this assessment was completed.
Ampio’s shares were hovering just above $1 in premarket trading this morning, and Ampio expects to continue to trade on the exchange until around April 14.