August 20, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Seattle-based Juno Therapeutics is on a roll, and on Tuesday, Ed White, an analyst with FBR Capital, gave the company an “Outperform” rating and a price target of $73.
Juno Therapeutics was ranked as the “most promising biopharma startup” in BioSpace ’s NextGen Bio Class of 2015. The company was spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has partnerships with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
The company is working on cancer immunotherapies in two separate but complementary platforms, Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs) and T Cell Receptors (TCRs). So-called CAR-T therapy focuses on removing T cells, a type of white cell, from the body, attaching a fragment of an antibody that recognizes and targets specific cancer cells, and inserting them back into the patient. This programs the patient’s immune system to attack tumor cells. It has, to date, shown effectiveness and reasonable safety against blood cancers like leukemias and lymphomas.
CAR-T is a hot area in cancer research now. Other companies working in the area include Novartis AG , Kite Pharma, Inc. , bluebird bio , Cellectis S/A, and ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc..
Juno went public in December 2014 and is . That makes White’s projection even more impressive as he expects the stock price to double. White notes the company has had success in Phase I studies for relapsed refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia and plans to begin a pivotal Phase II trial of JCAR017 in patients with the same indication soon. In addition, Juno has plans to file for approval with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late 2016 or early 2017.
In June of this year, Celgene Corporation coughed up $1 billion to Juno, getting a 10 percent stake in the company in addition to worldwide rights to commercialize the company’s eventual therapies. The deal involved acquiring approximately 9.1 million shares of Juno stock at $93 per share. Juno is responsible for research and development in North America and will hold commercial rights in those territories, while Celgene will be in charge of development and commercialization for the rest of the world. It will pay Juno royalties in those territories. Celgene also has the option to choose two programs, excluding CD19 and CD22, to be part of a global profit sharing deal, excluding China. A third program is also an option based on other negotiations.
In addition, Juno inked a collaboration deal with AstraZeneca Plc in April. Under that deal, AstraZeneca PLC ’s research and development arm, MedImmune , will test combinations of the two companies’ drugs for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
FBR Capital gave Juno an “Outperform” ranking. Northland Securities also gave an “Outperform” in July, and J.P. Morgan, in July, maintained an “Overweight” ranking.
One problem that analysts see over CAR-T therapy is that it is very individualized, which will make it difficult to mass produce. The technique requires working with and modifying each individual patient’s immune system, which is both complicated and expensive. To date, it appears to be effective in blood cancers, but results in solid tumors have been relatively disappointing.
“Everyone is standing on the sideline, to see if there are advances in scalability,” said Fabian Wenner, an analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich to Bloomberg Business in July. “Before that is visible, everyone is hesitant to invest much more because you could lose billions.”
