Nymox shares soar on late-stage BPH drug licensing deal

Shares of Nymox ($NYMX) raced up 35 percent in pre-market trading this morning after investors learned of its deal to license a late-stage therapy for benign prostatic hyperplasia to Italy's Recordati. The New Jersey biotech gets $13 million upfront and unspecified milestones in exchange for the European rights to NX-1207, now in a Phase III U.S. study.

In addition to the fees and milestones, Nymox also stands to earn royalties on a sliding scale that starts at 26 percent and can rise to 40 percent. "Recordati has a long history in Europe of clinical, regulatory and commercial expertise and has provided a strong commitment to the development and marketing of NX-1207," says Nymox CEO Paul Averback.

A locally injected drug, Nymox has boasted that in earlier trials "a single dose of NX-1207 has been found to produce very promising symptomatic improvements without causing the sexual or cardiovascular side effects associated with currently approved drugs."

Nymox has been on a roll recently. Just a couple of weeks ago the biotech announced that it had raised $15 million from institutional investors. The financing followed an announcement that in a late-stage study "a single administration of NX-1207 2.5 mg has produced on average improvements in the standardized BPH symptom score (8-10 points at 90 days) that were approximately double that reported for currently approved BPH drugs (3-5 points)."

- here's the Nymox release