Thursday's Health Winners & Losers

On the falling end, Advanced Life Sciences (ADLS) dropped 4.4%. In two late-stage clinical trials assessing the safety and effectiveness of cethromycin -- a treatment for community acquired pneumonia (CAP) -- the company said the drug achieved non-inferiority in its primary endpoint of per-protocol clinical cure rate. However, while cethromycin had a reported cure rate of 91.5%, Biaxin had a rate of 95.9% in the study.

"The comparator drug, Biaxin, achieved a cure rate higher than the historical rate observed in any reported Biaxin CAP clinical trials to date," Advanced Holdings explained in a press release. The company said the safety results were similar. Advanced Life closed down 14 cents at $3.05.

Elsewhere, IDM Pharma (IDMI) sank $1.12 or 27.1%, to $3.02 after it announced investors have agreed to purchase about 7.1 million shares of common stock and will also issue five-year warrants to investors to buy roughly 2.4 million more shares at an exercise price of $4.06 apiece. The warrants and shares will be purchased at $3.50 each. The company expects the sale to occur on or around June 25, and says it will result in $23.5 million after expenses and will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes.

And in the opposite direction, Commonweath Biotechnologies (CBTE) gained 33 cents, or 10.1%, to $3.60 after it said it anticipates two contract awards totaling $2.8 million. The first is a $1.7 million, three-year government contract for analytical methods for bio-toxin detection and quantitation, and the second is a $1.1 million contract with a private-sector client for more than one year for biomarker analysis by mass spectrometry. The company said it expects to begin work on both contracts in July and that it expects them to significantly affect revenue in the third and fourth quarters.

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