By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Shares of the battered biotech Vir Biotechnology were up more than 70% on Wednesday, as the company reported its first positive data since it executed a major pivot last summer.
A hot stock during the pandemic era, when its shares climbed more than 500% between the start of 2020 to early 2021, Vir's gains have since evaporated.
The new data comes six months after Vir announced a dramatic change in strategy. Once among the vanishingly few biotechs focused exclusively on infectious disease, Vir has pivoted to cancer, among the most crowded areas for biotech drug development.
Wednesday brought the first major update from the company since the August pivot, and the news was good.
Vir said that two early-stage drugs, VIR-5818 and VIR-5500, showed "compelling early clinical response signals" in an early trial in patients with various solid tumor cancers.
Both drugs are based on a technology that Vir has licensed from Sanofi called PRO-XTEN, which helps guide and disguise a type of immunotherapy called a T-cell engager.
In one of the Phase 1 trials, the company said that half of the 20 patients with a variety of heavily pretreated cancers, all of which expressed a marker known as HER2, and who received a higher dose of VIR-5818, had their tumors shrink.
In the other, patients with a form of prostate cancer who received VIR-5500 showed "encouraging signs" of a response.
Shares of a biotech called Janux Therapeutics, which is working on a similar medicine, were down 8.1%. The S&P 500 was flat in late morning trading.
Vir rocketed to prominence in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread around the world. A rare biotech focused on infectious disease, it had first gone public in late 2019, and was perfectly poised to seize the moment.
Vir specialized at the time in developing monoclonal antibodies it hoped would treat or prevent infectious diseases. Before the advent of Covid-19 vaccines, and the development of the Pfizer Covid-19 antiviral Paxlovid, monoclonal antibodies were a vital tool to treat high-risk patients.
The company eventually signed collaborations with Biogen, GSK, and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and in May 2021, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization to its Covid-19 monoclonal antibody, sotrovimab, which it had developed in partnership with GSK.
Vir shares, which had been trading around $15 in January 2020, closed over $80 in late January and mid-February 2021.
The evolution of the virus, however, quickly made sotrovimab obsolete. After that, the company's future hopes hinged on a monoclonal antibody treatment that was intended to prevent influenza infections, called VIR-2482. That drug failed in a trial in mid-2023, and by late in 2023 shares of Vir were trading below $10.
In a pivot announced in early August of last year, Vir said it would drop most of its infectious disease program. Instead, it said it would focus on hepatitis and on cancer drug technology it had licensed from Sanofi. The company also announced plans to lay off a quarter of its workforce.
Investors saw little to be excited about. The stock was down more than 20% in 2024.
Wednesday's data has sent shares up 74% since Tuesday's close. Wednesday's price of $13.84, however, remains a far cry from the company's pandemic-era highs. The new cancer data, though promising, will take years to lead to an approvable product.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 08, 2025 11:58 ET (16:58 GMT)
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