NOTE - Please note this stock is trading near $1 and has a market cap of less than $100mn. Avisol Capital recommends strong due diligence and considerable second thoughts while planning to invest in such companies.
Bellicum Pharmaceuticals(OTCPK:BLCM) is one strange company - it continues to present strong data from its BPX-501 and ~601 product candidates, and the stock continues to slide downwards.
There was a time - a few years ago - when Bellicum was the darling of investors in the CAR-T/T cell space. With its advanced therapy-controlling rimiducid switch used with its CAR-T/T cell drug candidate, it showed some spectacular if early results that made BLCM so attractive. In those days, it had a market cap of nearly $1bn and traded near $30. Today, this company has a market cap of $55mn and trades at around $1.
This is a sad story of a fall, and following George Santayana, who said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” we will take a quick recap of BLCM’s history before plunging into an analysis using our IOMachine method.
Bellicum: Some background
Founded in 2004, IPO-ing in 2014 when the CAR-T space was just heating up, Bellicum had a unique asset - its rimiducid-induced suicide switch that could self destruct its T cell therapy if it got out of hand. This was very important given the cytokine storm and the cytokine release syndrome resultant from therapy that, in at least one instance, actually killed patients, like in Juno’s Memorial Sloan trial. There were couple other companies with similar suicide switches, but for various reasons, Bellicum’s was considered the best.
In April, 2016, BLCM’s lead product candidate BPX-501, now called rivo-cel, showed positive results in pediatric patients - “Pediatric patients in the study with a variety of genetic diseases achieved disease-free outcomes following a
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