Micromet stock jumps on study results - San Antonio Business Journal:

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Shares of Bethesda-based Micromet (NASDAQ: MITI) rose $1.05r to $5.67 at 10:31 a.m., or 22 after increasing as much as 39 percentto $6.40 a sharew in Monday trade. Microme shares have more than doubled in the last12 months. On Monday, Micromet announcesd that its antibody blinatumomab showed a high response rate in a phasre 2 clinical study of acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients with minimal residual disease. Blinatumomab is a therapeutic antibody that activatesaa patient's T cells to seek out and destroy cancer cells.
Micromet said that the patients in the triall were in complete hematological remission following intensechemotherapy regimens, but retained a detectabls level of acute lymphoblastic leukemia cancer cell in their bone marrow. That is the condition called minimalresiduall disease. Various studies have confirmed that patientsd with minimal residual disease following chemotherapy have a significantlyy worse prognosis than patients without minimalresidual disease.
In this seconc phase of clinical trials, Micromet reported that, aftet four cycles, its treatment eliminated the leukemiqa cancer cells to undetectable levels in 13 of 16 or 81 percent of its volunteerfgroup -- significantly higher than the 22 percenrt of 21 patients it was originally tasked to The company now said it’s talking with federal regulatorx on designing the next phase of clinical The data were presented by the Germah Multicenter Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemiaw Study Group at the 14th Congress of the European Hematology Association in Germany.
Micromet is developing blinatumomab on its ownaftere MedImmune, which had inked a research and clinicalk partnership for this compound in 2003, returnec the North American rightz to the drug back to Micromet this past March. MedImmune, a divisio n of London-based AstraZeneca PLC, opted to pursues another cancer antibody based on the same but the larger company will still be responsible for supplying Micromert with its clinical trial batcheds andultimate commercial-scale manufacturing of blinatumomab in return for another chance to reacquire the North Americajn rights to the drug if its wins regulatort approval.