June 14, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Agenus is a small immuno-oncology company based in Lexington, Massachusetts. The company is working on checkpoint inhibitors, and has agreements and partnerships in place with Incyte and Merck . With fairly low stock value and potential blockbuster immuno-oncology drugs in the pipeline, there’s speculation that companies such as Pfizer might gobble it up.
Most recently, on June 9, Agenus announced the deal with Merck. Merck picked a lead antibody candidate and several backup antibodies, all of which were discovered by Agenus. Under the terms of the deal, Agenus received a $2 million milestone payment.
Merck will handle all future development expenses, and Agenus could receive up to $100 million more in milestone payments, as well as global royalties.
“We are pleased that in collaboration with Merck scientists, our research team has successfully identified antibody candidates to advance into preclinical studies,” said Garo Armen, chairman and chief executive officer of Agenus, in a statement. “This is an important validation of our discovery platform and expertise and adds to our successes in discovering antibodies for a broad range of targets, including challenging ones.”
On its own, Agenus in April l announced the first dosing of a patient in a Phase I trial of AGEN1884, an anti-CTLA-4 checkpoint (CPM) antibody. The trial is primarily focused on safety and determining the estimated maximum tolerated dose in patients with advanced or refractory cancer.
“Advancing AGEN1884 into the clinic is an important milestone for Agenus,” said Armen in a statement in April. “Since the acquisition of 4-Antibody two years ago, we have completed additional strategic acquisitions and formed new collaborations considerably strengthening our antibody research and development capabilities.”
The company also has a heat shock protein-based vaccine, Prophage, which has successfully completed Phase II trials in newly-diagnosed glioblastoma patients.
Generally, though, this hasn’t resulted in stock growth. traded for $9.38 on July 17, 2015, dropped to $4.43 on Sept. 29, 2015, then further to $2.72 on Feb. 11, 2016. They climbed some to $4.68 on April 6, 2016, then dropped to $3.01 on May 6, rose again to $4.50 on June 2. Shares are currently trading for $4.
Writing for The Motley Fool, George Budwell writes, “While the market has yet to take notice, there’s good reason to believe that this stock is woefully undervalued, and may attract the attention of bigger fish like Pfizer as a result. The core issue at play here is that Agenus sports a wide range of monoclonal antibodies targeting a rich array of receptors, such as GITR, OX40, PD-1, CTLA-4, TIM-3, LAG-3, and CEACAM1.”
It also operates 4-Antibody, a company located in Basel, Switzerland and Jena, Germany, which is a fully-human antibody drug-discovery technology platform. The company’s tech platform itself is called Retrocyte Display, which creates high quality therapeutic antibody drug candidates using a high-throughput approach that incorporates human antibody libraries expressed in mammalian B-lineage lymphocytes.
Although Budwell thinks Pfizer might very well be interested in Agenus, he also believes “it’s a long-shot. After all, Pfizer does have other checkpoint inhibitors under development right now, resulting in some noteworthy overlap with Agenus’ current platform.”
A deal with Merck or Incyte probably would be more likely. Both companies have stayed mum about the specific anti-cancer targets they’re looking at in their deals with Agenus, which at least partially explains why the market hasn’t paid too much attention to the company yet.
Budwell says, “Even though Agenus would seem to offer a strong anti-cancer drug platform for a relatively cheap price, it’s important to remember that buying a stock based solely on buyout speculation is never a good idea.”
