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Corvus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRVS) hit a new all-time low recently at $2.56/share (10/03/2019). In addition, its market cap reached the $73-77 million it estimates to have on hand at the end of 2019. In other words, Corvus was trading at its cash value. This means the market is essentially giving no value to its three drugs currently in clinical trials. Back in early July, the company's shares jumped to $6 on some insider buying, but quickly dropped when Novo Nordisk sold more than 1.4 million shares. Since then, the shares have continued to slide and the slide is accelerating.
This is all the more surprising since Corvus is following the playbook of two of the most successful drugs of the 2010s: Merck's pembrolizumab or pembro (brand name: Keytruda) and AbbVie's ibrutinib (brand name: Imbruvica). David Shaywitz has written two wonderful articles in Forbes detailing the development of these two blockbuster drugs. In one of these articles, he describes that Merck's pembro was on its out-license list until Bristol-Myers Squibb published results of a drug with a similar mechanism. However, he writes that what really propelled pembro was the use of a biomarker in clinical trials that allowed Merck to select patients who it knew had a better chance of succeeding. Pembro sales exceeded $7 billion in 2018 and are estimated to be $9 billion in 2019.
In the other article, Dr. Shaywitz describes that Celera's ibrutinib was sold outright to Dr. Miller (now co-founder of Corvus), then of Pharmacyclics (now owned by AbbVie), along with some other assets "for a pittance." Ibrutinib
