Comment by comrade1234
1 year ago
My wife’s company developed a multiple myeloma immunotherapy that is for people that have had previous treatments of other drugs but then go into remission.
It works so well that their efficacy reports have caveats like “not enough patients that were treated have died yet” to provide meaningful statistics.
The drug was initially developed in china. They presented results at a conference in the USA but no one believed them other than a skeptical Pfizer who sent a big team to china to confirm the data. Pfizer soon invested billions into the company and drug to bring it to market.
The drug’s sales are on track to be $1 billion this year but the stock is heavily depressed because of the china connection.
What kind of focus do biopharma companies put on their stock prices? If a company like the one you described had a great treatment option that could genuinely help people and was raking in money by the boatload, is that “enough” for them as a “winning” business strategy regardless of how outside investors might perceive it?
Biotech companies raise money by selling shares. That's they go public so early compared to any other sector. The more suppressed your share price is, the harder it is to raise the money you need to do research and clinical trials.
Selling $1B of drugs might no necessarily mean they have sufficient free cash flow to do the things they want to do.
It leaves them vulnerable to takeover, for one. They have over $1B cash right now to pay for clinical trials in other markets as well as new indications but their valuation is about 5x that. Someone could leverage the $1B as part of a hostile takeover.
Any chance you could share what therapy this is or at least a hint?