Corbus Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CRBP)
Next, Corbus Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CRBP). Corbus on June 15 closed on a $15 million RDO, which saw the company sell 5.96 million previously shelved shares for a purchase price of $2.5 a share. Shares were at $3 a share on June 15 which means the discount was less than 17% and no warrants were offered. Gross proceeds came in at $14.9 million, and the company netted almost all of that at $14.8 million after expenses. The filing that shelved the shares came in November last year, and the shares offered went to a host of big name institutional investment entities including Perceptive Advisors, Ghost, Tree Capital and DAFNA.
Corbus Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CRBP) is a biotech with a cystic fibrosis target, whose lead candidate is an endocannabinoid mimetic called Resunab. The drug targets CB2 receptors that when activated, reverse the inflammation process associated with cystic fibrosis, theoretically stopping or slowing the fibrosis element of the disease.
Phase I safety and efficacy data suggested both tolerability and a certain level of clinical activity, and Resunab is currently in a multi center phase II that aims to build on the efficacy of the initial data. Just as with Vascular, Corbus Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:CRBP) intends to use the capital raised to push forward with their phase II in Resunab, capitalizing the trial through to completion come December this year.
This one is particularly noteworthy firstly because of the prominence of the associated parties. Perceptive Life Sciences was the top performing fund across all sectors for 2015, while DAFNA was the second top performing fund in the life sciences space for 2014. Second, the raise brings the total capital invested in Corbus to $37 million across the last two years alone. For a development stage biotech company the size of Corbus, this is an impressive total raise and is indicative of wider market confidence in the company’s ability to carry Resunab through to commercialization.
CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSEMKT:CVM)
Finally, CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSEMKT:CVM). CEL-SCI announced mid last month that it had closed on an RDO that saw it offer 10 million shares of common stock and up to 6.6 million warrants to a single institutional healthcare investor (as yet, unnamed), for a total raise of $5 million.
CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSEMKT:CVM) is an oncology company, with a lead investigational treatment called Multikine. The drug is an injection that is essentially a soup of different cytokines, each of which have a different effect on target cells, but all of which target stimulation of the immune system in patients. Because of its focus on immune system stimulation, Multikine is technically part of the wider field of immune-oncology, but not in the traditional sense because it’s part of a new subsector being referred to as combination immunotherapy.
The drug demonstrated safety and tolerability in a phase I, and showed some clinical activity in a phase II targeting head and neck cancer patients. In an ongoing phase III, CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSEMKT:CVM) is investigating the efficacy of the injection in the same indication (head and neck cancer) in patients that are yet to receive any other type of therapy. This is key, as there is strong evidence that immunotherapy diminishes in value once a patient has undergone chemotherapy or radiotherapy. This is because both of these latter treatment options can contribute to a weakened immune system, and in turn, limit any potential impact that the immune system can have on cancer cells once recruited through a drug like Multikine. Primary completion, and in turn, a potential near term upside catalyst, is set for August 2016, less than two months away.
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