Antigenics’ shares slide down (NASDAQ:AGEN)

On Wednesday morning, Antigenics had a fresh round of bad news from European regulators announcing that they have rejected their new kidney cancer vaccine called Oncophage. The news soon showed its impact on the shares of Antigenics as they went sliding down around 42 percent. Though Antigenics did mentioned that the decision was totally verbal, and that European regulators might give it a second thought investors who were totally discouraged by the news decided to quickly bail out on the company’s stocks.

Antigenics’ Oncophage drug was earlier approved in Russia for the treatment of kidney cancer patients at intermediate risk for disease recurrence. The company has already launched Oncophage in the second half of 2008. Outside Russia, Oncophage is an investigational patient-specific vaccine designed to treat cancer with the intent of minimizing side effects. Antigenics claim that Oncophage is designed to limit the toxicities associated with traditional broad-acting cancer treatments.

Antigenics had a lot of hopes that their new kidney cancer vaccine would be approved by the European regulators despite two pivotal failures for kidney cancer and skin cancer. Also the company has mentioned that they cannot seek FDA approval for the moment with the kind of data they have, but they have not lost any hope and will surely go for the approval later.