The Firm plans to discontinue additional growth of HIL-214 in infants and is exploring the potential for continued growth of HIL-214 and HIL-216, HilleVax’s Section 1 prepared vaccine candidate, in adults.
The piece about persevering with to discover the potential growth of HIL-216 is barely regarding as damaged biotechnology corporations go. HIL-214 (the failed vaccine) was licensed from Takeda (which owns 14% of HLVX), HIL-216 was a separate licensing settlement with a Chinese language pharmaceutical firm, Kangh, and thus administration would possibly make the argument the HIL-214 failure should not cloud the potential for HIL-214. Nevertheless, as we have seen with many others, typically the board together with their advisors decide that the price of capital is simply too excessive to proceed on their very own they usually’ll probably determine to pursue strategic alternate options.
Working by means of my typical again of the envelope liquidation math:
HilleVax does have an ATM in place they leaned on fairly closely in Q1 to boost roughly $15MM, in the event that they continued into Q2 (which you’ll inform they did a bit primarily based on the change in share depend from 3/31 to five/6 when the final 10-Q was revealed) it could solely add upside to the mathematics. The danger is admittedly within the burn price going ahead from right here (additionally observe, my Q2 quantity above is an estimate primarily based on Q1) since we have no indication from administration on their plan, my $50MM in a complete guess however utilizing some expertise from the final dozen or so of those, hopefully it’s directionally appropriate.
There could possibly be two catalysts right here, one on the announcement of strategic alternate options and one other on the final word conclusion, however HLVX is a bit riskier than others which are additional alongside of their wind down course of.
Disclosure: I personal shares of HLVX
