Wedbush Just Downgraded Celladon To Neutral And Slashed Its PT By $26

In a report published Monday, Wedbush analysts downgraded Celladon Corp CLDN from Outperform to Neutral. The price target has been lowered from $29 to $3. The company announced on Sunday that Mydicar had failed to meet the primary and secondary endpoints in the CUPID2 trials. Shares were down 75 percent (about $10) at $3.50 in Monday's pre-market session. According to the analysts, "In the primary endpoint, time to recurrent heart failure related events, Mydicar had a HR of 0.93 (p=0.81) vs placebo." However, no clinical benefit was established for any of the other endpoints, including "time to first terminal event, improvement in NYHA classification, 6 MWT, and QoL." See Also: Celladon Reports Negative Results for CUPID2 Trial of MYDICAR(R) in Advanced Heart Failure The analysts, therefore, believe that further development of Mydicar is unlikely in hear failure. While the company did explain data analysis was still ongoing, the absence of benefit across the various endpoints point to the unlikelihood of any further development of this drug for heart failure. "Further Mydicar development in AV-fistula maturation failure is a possibility, given the different biological role SERCA2a is believed to play in the pathology of fistula failure. CLDN had previously guided to advancing the preclinical fistula program into a Phase 2b study later this year," Wedbush said. Regarding the causes of this failure in CUPID2, the analysts believe that there are possibilities that the either did not transducer enough cells or transducer any cells at all, and even if it did transducer cells, the protein content was insufficient to lead to positive outcomes. Wedbush also believes that SERCA2a might not be a valid target in the treatment of heart failure.