Odonate Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ODT) shares threatened to come bursting out of the blocks Tuesday morning, following 13G from Ikarian Capital showing a 5.2% stake in the company.
Last week, the company submitted a regulatory filing to indicate that Ikarian Capital has raised its stake at the company to more than 5%. The biotech firm held a 3.5% stake at Odonate in late March with ~1.34M shares. The latest 13-G filing indicates Ikarian now owns ~2.0M of shares implying a ~5.2% ownership.
Odonate has lost ~92.1% of its value over the past year driven by a sharp decline in March on the decision to terminate the development of its orally administered chemotherapy agent tesetaxel. The event prompted Jefferies to downgrade the stock to neutral from hold. At the time, the analyst Michael Yee predicted Odonate could be a “reverse-merger candidate.”
In May, the last time the company reported $133.2 million in cash compared to $157.3 million as of December 31, 2020. This decrease in cash resulted primarily from cash used in operating activities for the three months ended March 31, 2021 of $24.9 million. Odonate’s net loss for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020 was $33.8 million and $30.2 million, or $0.90 and $0.99 per share, respectively.
Odonate is a pharmaceutical company formerly focused on the development of tesetaxel, an investigational, orally administered chemotherapy agent that belongs to a class of drugs known as taxanes, which are widely used in the treatment of cancer
ODT shares climbed 28 cents, or 8.1%, Tuesday morning to $3.75.
