USD573M in retained losses and a less than great 2020!. 2021 a year that cannot get worse, page-55

Despite the nice wording, the trial was stopped for futility. It had no chance of meeting the primary endpoint so they stopped enrolling. The DSMB recommended they continue the trial to the end with the currently enrolled patients to see any effects on secondary endpoints, but the trial not being continued to full enrolment is by definition halting for futility. The way it was presented in the press release was marketing speak for this, though that doesn't mean that there won't be some interesting findings from the trial - covid is so new and our understanding of the disease is in its infancy, so anything could pop up in the secondary endpoints during the full data analysis.

The path back to hype for MSB is if Novartis and MSB find something really promising in the full data. That would mean they have a chance to verify it through further phase 3 trial(s), leading to a potential approval or EUA from the FDA.

If there's nothing interesting in the data then that would be a very big step backwards.