The careful prescription and use of drugs, for medicinal purposes, can relieve suffering and promote well-being, but addiction, misuse, and on occasion, over-dosage, can lead to coma and death. It’s a problem in society that urgently needs to be addressed.
More than a few times, we have read and heard about certain people, particularly youngsters, stealing their parents’ medications to get high, sometimes with fatal consequences – medications that were at first legitimately prescribed. Sometimes, just keeping the illegal stuff out of the wrong hands isn’t enough.
Acura Pharmaceuticals Inc, (NASDAQ: ACUR) is a specialty pharmaceutical company based out of Palatine, Illinois, in the business of fashioning products designed to fight drug abuse and misuse. The Company researches, develops, and manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients used as raw materials in the production of pharmaceutical products. Acura has developed technologies for use in narcotic-based pain management products.
Given the recent, shocking, assertion by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that one American dies from prescription drug abuse every 19 minutes, it’s a vital slot to fill.
The products in question utilize the company’s proprietary abuse deterrent AVERSION and IMPEDE technologies. The flagship products are called OXECTA and NEXAFED.
NEXAFED is a 30-milligram immediate-release pseudoephedrine product that combines effective nasal-congestion relief with a unique technology that disrupts the conversion of pseudoephedrine into the dangerous drug, methamphetamine. The product launched commercially last December and just this month, Acura announced that the Kerr Drug store chain in North Carolina will be carrying NEXAFED. Meth production and abuse is a growing problem in communities nationwide.
Acura’s products – and those up for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- are based on widely-used commercial products, without altering the safety of the active ingredients assigned to relieve pain, while discouraging common methods of product tampering. By that, the company means, dissolving into solutions that can be injected intravenously, among other methods.
On the investment front, on Friday of this week, Acura announced that its universal shelf registration statement on Form S-3 was declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The universal shelf registration statement permits the Company to offer and sell, from time to time, on a continuous or delayed basis in the future, up to $75 million U.S. of equity, debt or other types of securities described in the shelf registration statement, or any combination of such securities, in one or more future public offerings.
Acura reported a net loss of $3.0 million U.S. for the fourth quarter 2012 or $0.06 per diluted share, nearly twice the net loss of $1.6 million or $0.03 per diluted share for the same period in 2011. No revenue was reported in either period.
Research and development expenses associated with product candidates utilizing the company's AVERSION® and IMPEDE™ Technologies were $1.2 million U.S. in the fourth quarter 2012, compared to about $800,000 U.S. for the same period in 2011, meaning black ink is still a thing of the future, presumably, once more drug store chain deals are forged.
Meantime, on Friday, ACUR’s stock price closed down 16 cents, or 6.4%, from the session before, to end the week at $2.35 U.S., on a volume of 257,000 shares. In December, the stock hit its 52-week high at $4.50 U.S., having climbed very quickly out of a gulch of $1.06 U.S. in November.
Related Stories
