Over a decade ago, when I first purchased shares of Insmed, there were so many things going on.... The market had endured a total collapse, but suddenly there was Insmed standing tall with a fresh 130 Million dollars, courtesy of Merck, for the sale of the company manufacturing facility. With such a depressed market, I felt pretty good about Insmed getting more at that time for those funds than they would have been able to in years. What they ended up getting was Arikayce, which may end up having first year sales close to the purchase price.
Insmed was also nearing the end of a phase 2 muscular dystrophy trial using iPLEX, and was shipping iPLEX to Italy to fight ALS. The trial, of course, failed, and soon Insmed ran out of iPLEX.
There is more going on right now. Soon we will see the confirmatory study trial design which will give clues as to whether Arikayce will ever be the front line "go to" drug when patients receive that awful NTM with MAC diagnosis. We may also see a new trial for patients diagnosed with NTM m. abscessus pulmonary disease.
Then we will get movement with INS1007 for non cf bronchiectasis when the WILLOW phase 2 study is fully enrolled in the next month or so. The company also plans on running a few small phase 2 studies to see if INS1007 is effective vs. Wegeners disease (That one always came up on the old House series)
Then there is INS1009. This drug. much like arikayce, would use the liposome technology to make proven trepostinil more effective. Currently two of the top five most reimbursed medicare drugs are for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Both are manufactured by United Therapeutics. The Chief Medical Officer at United Therapeutics was Eugene Sullivan who now holds the position of Chief Product Strategy Officer at Insmed.
I just believe that Insmed has enough in the hopper that whatever the XBI decides to do, Insmed can do something very impressive all by itself. Arikayce, as impressive as it's early performance has been, will hopefully end up being the original product approved using the insmed platform.