Syros Pharmaceuticals (OTC:SYRS) is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company specializing in cancer drugs based on a gene expression platform. When I last wrote about the stock in late January 2020 the stock price was $7.74 after having closed on January 2, 2020, at $7.13. On Friday, December 25, 2020, it closed at $13.08, having reached a 52-week high of $15.44 on December 22, 2020. That means it roughly doubled in the year. Its most recent spike came after a drug candidate acquisition deal that I will discuss below. While that will be the focus of this article, I will also give an update on the clinical-stage therapy that is about to enter a Phase 3 trial. I believe the bulk of the value in the company is in that potential therapy, SY-1425.
New drug acquired: SY-2101
On December 5, 2020, Syros announced it acquired ORH-2014 from Orsenix, now to be known as SY-2101. Essentially, SY-2101 is an oral formulation of an already approved medicine, Teva's (TEVA) Trisenox, given by infusion that has a high success rate treating patients with a very particular type of acute myeloid leukemia. The active ingredient, Arsenic trioxide, may sound like a primitive treatment compared to antibodies and other newer categories of medicines, but it works well for APL, acute promyelocytic leukemia. Trisenox in 2019 cost $508 per dose or about $30,000 for a sixty-day treatment. APL represents about 10% of AML cases, or about 1,000 new cases annually in the U.S. With the standard treatment of ATRA and Trisenox, the survival rate for APL is high, with about 90% remission.
The math may sound good, $30,000 times 1,000 or $30 million per year in the United States alone, much more if the drug goes global, but the deal does not reflect that. Syros paid just $12 million upfront to Orsenix, which could also
