Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NKTR) stock fell over 0.4% in the pre-market session on May 11th, 2018 on mixed first quarter of 2018 performance. The group had $333.8 million of cash and investments as of first quarter of 2018. The group got $1.85 billion from BMS, which comprises a $1 billion upfront payment and an $850 million premium equity investment. They intend to end the year with a cash position of over $1.9 billion to 1.925 billion. The group is also boosting their full-year guidance to over $1.1 billion. Their full year revenue outside of the payments from the BMS collaboration is unchanged at $100 million to $110 million, and forecasting the rest of the revenue to be recognized ratably over the remaining quarters of 2018.
During April, they announced the new clinical collaboration with Takeda to evaluate NKTR-214 with Takeda’s dual SYK-FLT inhibitor known as TAK-659 for treating liquid and solid tumors. TAK-659 is a clinical stage compound developed by Takeda that has already shown clinical activity in non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.
The group is aiming to realize a full potential of cancer immunotherapy. During March they started to REVEAL clinical trial, evaluating the combination of NKTR-214 with their polymer conjugated intra-tumoral TLR-78 agonist NKTR-262. The group is seeing the advancements of NKTR-214 into the liquid tumor setting and their initial clinical study would evaluate the combination of NKTR-214 plus TAK-695 in Hodgkin’s — non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and trial would begin later this year.
The group is conducting preclinical research in syngeneic mouse tumor models evaluating doublet combinations of NKTR-214 with path inhibitor and with the dipeptidyl peptidase or DPP inhibitor, as well as in tumor models with neoantigen-based vaccines in order to explore patient specific personalized cancer vaccine strategy. They also dosed the first patients in the Phase 1b trial of NKTR-358, which is a multiple ascending dose escalation study in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus also known as lupus. The PD markers would comprise the evaluation of T-regs, T conventional cells, the Th17 to T-reg ratios, B cells and memory B cell levels, NK cells, as well as disease specific serum biomarkers, including anti-double-stranded DNA antibodies and compliment.