Brickell Biotech launches brand reset amid positioning pivot 

BOULDER —  Brickell Biotech Inc. (Nasdaq: BBI), a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, has launched a new brand, logo and website as the company seeks to pivot away from drugs that combat excessive sweating toward treatments for autoimmune, inflammatory and other debilitating diseases.

The company is now calling itself Fresh Tracks Therapeutics Inc. and expects to trade under the new Nasdaq ticker symbol FRTX beginning Thursday. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, Fresh Tracks Therapeutics had not been registered as a trade name with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.

The rebrand comes less than a half-year after Brickell sold off the rights to sofpironium bromide, its excessive-sweating drug, for a $9 million upfront payment, to Botanix Pharmaceuticals Ltd., which pledged to make “additional success-based regulatory and sales milestone payments of up to $168 million and tiered earn out payments ranging from high-single digits to mid-teen digits on net sales” of the gel, the company said in May.

“Over the past year, our company executed a fundamental shift in strategy by acquiring multiple innovative platforms with broad potential as treatments for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases,” Brickell CEO Robert Brown said in a prepared statement. “This includes FRTX-02 (formerly BBI-02), a clinical-stage oral DYRK1A inhibitor, FRTX-10 (formerly BBI-10), a preclinical-stage STING inhibitor, and our next-generation kinase inhibitors. At its core, this rebrand highlights our commitment to shift treatment paradigms by exploring beyond current conventions with targeted, science-driven, and potential first-in-class therapies.” 

In conjunction with the rebrand, Fresh Tracks has launched a scientific advisory board that the company said is made up of “renowned scientists and clinicians with deep experience across immunology and inflammation.”

As Fresh Tracks begins to trade under its new ticker symbol, the company’s struggles to maintain its Nasdaq listing continue. 

The company received notice from regulators late last month that it faces delisting from the stock exchange after the July resignation of Dennison T. Veru from its board of directors.

With Veru’s resignation, Brickell’s board is no longer made up of a majority of independent directors, which violates Nasdaq rules. Brickell has until its next annual shareholders meeting to come back into compliance. 

This is the second time this year that the company has faced delisting from the Nasdaq. In June, Brickell received a delisting notice because its stock price had dropped below the minimum threshold of $1 for more than 30 consecutive days. The company held an emergency shareholders meeting in which it enacted a 1-for-45 reverse stock split that brought its share price back over $1.

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