Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: ARWR) shares made a considerable gain early on Thursday after the firm announced data from its hepatitis B (HBV) clinical trial with ARO-HBV.

These results represent the first clinical data presented on ARO-HBV, which leverages Arrowhead’s proprietary Targeted RNAi Molecules (TRiM) platform. The company intends to submit a late-breaking abstract with additional clinical data to the Liver Meeting, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD), being held in November 2018.

Overall, the data demonstrated that three monthly doses of ARO-HBV led to a maximum reduction in circulating HBV surface antigen. All eight patients achieved significant reductions in circulating HBV surface antigen.

ARO-HBV was generally well-tolerated with generally mild and self-limiting injection site adverse events being the most commonly reported event in chronic HBV patients, occurring in around 10% of injections.

Bruce Given, M.D., Arrowhead’s chief operating officer and head of R&D, commented:

These initial results from the first two multiple-ascending dose cohorts of the AROHBV1001 clinical study are encouraging and indicate that ARO-HBV is highly active. In addition, the drug appears to be generally well-tolerated, which is consistent with our experience to date with ARO-AAT, our TRiM enabled candidate for the treatment of Alpha-1 liver disease. We intend to submit late-breaking abstracts to the AASLD Liver Meeting for both ARO-HBV and ARO-AAT, and, if accepted, we look forward to presenting more complete data-sets, including additional dose levels and longer follow-up.

Shares of Arrowhead Pharma traded up more than 33% early Thursday at $18.86, with a consensus analyst price target of $14.75 and a 52-week trading range of $2.65 to $17.50.

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