Update on potential of Galeterone in Prostate Cancer $TKAI
Yesterday saw the news that Tokai Pharmaceuticals ($TKAI) have filed plans for a $75M IPO, largely based on the potential of their phase 2 prostate cancer compound, galeterone.
$TKAI Tokai files for IPO. Galeterone for prostate cancer is lead pic.twitter.com/1rGjyP4jPz — j l (@lomu_j) August 11, 2014
Prostate cancer biotech Tokai Pharmaceuticals files for a $75 million IPO $TKAI #Biotech $IPO #IPO http://t.co/EGaUdKaffD
— Renaissance Capital (@IPOtweet) August 11, 2014
My first reaction on seeing this was $75M – that’s a pretty small number.
It’s been many years since I project managed drug development trials but $75M does not go a long way if you want to run a global phase 3 program. It’s certainly pails into insignificance in comparison to the recent $308M raised by Juno in Series A & B financing.
A cynical view would be to see this as the initial investors looking for a ‘save face’ exit strategy. Tokai have spent the last 10 years seeking to bring a novel prostate cancer drug to market, and they are still only in phase 2. To put this in perspective, they were initially ahead of Medivation!
Fast forward 10 years and the prostate market is now highly competitive, with other new products ahead of galeterone in development including next generation androgen receptor antagonists: ARN-509 (acquired by JNJ from Aragon) and ODM-201 (Bayer/Orion). We’ve also seen a several drugs that showed promise in phase 2, fall by the way side in phase 3; dasatinib from BMS and Orteronel (TAK-700) from Takeda/Millennium readily come to mind. Caveat emptor!
At ASCO 2014, there was a lot of interesting data in the oral prostate cancer session, which provided insights into the challenges (in addition to the competition) and opportunities that may exist for galeterone.
I have no intention of taking any future position in $TKAI. This piece offers no recommendation on whether you should invest or not.
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2 Responses to “Update on potential of Galeterone in Prostate Cancer $TKAI”
Nice piece, Pieter. Just one quick question: are there any public companies developing bromodomain inhibitors? I only found private companies.
Juan, thanks for the comment.
I’ve not yet done a detailed analysis of the bromodomain inhibitor market, but you may want to look for public companies that are licensing private companies e.g. Medivation have a license agreement with Oncofusion Therapeutics, so clearly see the potential opportunity and need for an effective treatment for those that acquire resistance to enzalutamide. I mentioned this in a recent post:
https://biotechstrategyblog.com/2014/06/a-potential-new-target-for-prostate-cancer-drug-development.html/
Expect we’ll hear more as the initial clinical trial data on bromodomain inhibitor matures in near future – it’s certainly an area we are watching and will write more about in due course.
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