Manufacturing issues send Nektar shares off cliff

9 August 2019

Nektar Therapeutics (Nasdaq: NKTR) lost more than a third of its market value in the opening hours of Friday’s trading.

The US biotech company’s chief executive Howard Robin had said on an earnings call Thursday night that there had been manufacturing issues in two batches of the experimental cancer drug NKTR-214 given to patients in a trial, leading analysts to downgrade the stock to hold.

A Barron’s report claimed that there had also been a signal of a narrowing of Nektar’s collaboration with US pharma major Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMS) in another potentially major setback.

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