Roth bullish on Cardiol, says trial results enough to attract larger partner

Keeping a Buy rating on Cardiol Therapeutics (CRDL), Roth Capital notes that top-line results for the ARCHER for Acute Myocarditis study were very encouraging. On the primary endpoint of left ventricular extracellular volume it showed a notable improvement favoring CardiolRx over placebo, but just missed statistical significance, which is encouraging for a larger trial as so far, no other trial has shown improvement here. Roth also notes that the company did not meet the other independent primary endpoint of improvement in Global Longitudinal Strain, but this was as expected as it was a relatively high bar on patients that were relatively healthy with preserved left ventricle function. The firm thinks these results are good enough to attract a larger partner to run a much larger heart failure trial as well as support a larger pivotal trial for acute myocarditis.