March 3, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
THE WOODLANDS, Texas – Opexa Therapeutics is handing out pink slips to about 30 percent of its workforce, including the chief financial officer, as the company undergoes a restructuring plan to extend the company’s cash runaway into the first quarter of 2017, the company announced this morning.
Opexa which has a market capitalization of $15.72 million, is developing personalized immunotherapies for autoimmune disorders, including for multiple sclerosis (MS) and neuromyelitis optica. The restructuring and layoffs come as Opexa prepares to complete its Phase IIb clinical trial of its lead drug candidate Tcelna in secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS) and report top-line data during the fourth quarter of 2016, Neil Warma, Opexa’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. Tcelna is made of of myelin-reactive T-cells, which are “expanded ex vivo from the patient’s peripheral blood and reintroduced into the same patient in an attenuated form via subcutaneous injections,” the company said on its website. That injectable process is expected to trigger a “potent immune response against specific subsets of autoreactive T-cells known to attack myelin for each individual patient.”
Opexa administered the last dose in the 190-patient Phase IIb trial in the last week of February and has completed approximately 97 percent of all patient visits. Warma said he believes the Abili-T study could yield the first effective treatment for secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. Opexa’s pipeline is based on its proprietary T-cell technology.
“SPMS remains an area of critical unmet medical need and the completion of it is an important step in the development of what we believe could be the first safe and effective treatment for this disease,” Warma said in a statement.
A diagnosis of SPMS often follows an initial relapsing-remitting course, making it a second phase of multiple sclerosis. Many patients with RRMS will transition into SPMS, where there is a progressive worsening of neurological function.
Layoffs at Texas-based Opexa will include Karthik Radhakrishnan, the company’s chief financial officer. In total 11 positions will be eliminated. Prior to the layoffs, Opexa employed 36. The layoffs are expected to have a $325,000 severance payout impact during the first quarter of 2016, the company said.
Opexa’s stock is down this morning, trading at $2.27 per share, as of this writing. Overall Opexa stock has been on a downward slide over the past year. In March 2015 Opexa’s stock was trading at a high of $7.04 per share. Few biotech stocks are performing well in 2016, as the S&P 500 Biotech Index is down more than 25 percent since the beginning of the year and the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index is down more than 26 percent since January.
