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February 25, 2020 Bioscience Notebook

Shelton company working on coronavirus treatment

IMAGE | Pixabay.com
By Natalie Missakian

After months of shaky finances, Shelton antiviral developer NanoViricides Inc. said Monday that it has enough cash to carry out its planned expenditures for the coming year, which includes advancing its skin cream for the shingles rash into clinical trials and working on a treatment for the deadly coronavirus.

In a news release, the company noted that it recently drew down $1.1 million from a previously announced $2 million mortgage-backed bridge loan from its founder and President Anil Diwan. It also raised $7.78 million in a recent public offering. 

“With these cash inflows, the company believes it has sufficient funding for its planned expenditures for the ensuing year, based on estimated budgets including costs of certain clinical trials,” the release said.

The announcement coincided with the filing late last week of the company’s most recent quarterly report with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. 

For the period ended Dec. 31, NanoViricides reported a net loss of $1.93 million, or 50 cents a share, down from $2.23 million (64 cents a share) in 2018, according to the report. The company does not produce any revenue at this time.

NanoViricides reported cash and cash equivalents on hand of $707,648 as of Dec. 31. 

In addition to the shingles treatment, the company said it has also begun working on developing a treatment for COVID-19, the coronavirus that has killed more than 2,600 people and sickened more than 79,000 worldwide.

The company, which develops so-called nanomedicines, said it has already found “broad-spectrum virus-binding ligands that are expected to attack the virus at the same points that the virus uses to bind to its cognate cellular receptor.” Diwan has described the company’s nanoviricides as “a 'Venus-Fly-Trap' for a virus particle.”

The company’s stock price has tripled since mid-January amid fears about the coronavirus, with Diwan appearing twice on Fox Business in January discussing the company’s work on a potential treatment, but saying it would need support from governmental and international agencies. 

However, some analysts have been skeptical that NanoViricides can deliver, citing the 15-year-old company’s financial struggles and its inability so far to move any of its drug candidates beyond the pre-clinical stage and into human testing. 

NanoViricides has said it is working on “developing necessary collaborations to take the program further should an effective drug candidate be identified.” 

In 2014, the company said it worked on developing antiviral treatments against another coronavirus threat, known as MERS, and had developed potential candidates for testing in animals. But the MERS threat was quickly eclipsed by the Ebola epidemic of 2015, NanoViricides said. 

NanoViricides' stock opened at $9.16 on Tuesday morning, up from $2.56 at the start of the year.

* * *

BioXcel Therapeutics Inc. announced last week that it planned to raise $64 million by selling 2 million shares of stock at $32 a share in a public offering. 

The New Haven company, which is developing a drug to treat agitation, said it intends to use proceeds from the sale to repurchase shares of its common stock from its parent, BioXcel Corp., at a price equal to the price paid by the underwriters for such shares in the public offering. The repurchased shares would then be canceled, BioXcel said. 

BofA Securities, Canaccord Genuity and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey acted as joint book-running managers for the offering. H.C. Wainwright & Co acted as co-manager. 

The offering closed on Monday. The company gave underwriters a 30-day option to buy an additional 30,000 shares. 

BioXcel’s stock opened at $32.20 on Tuesday. 

Contact Natalie Missakian at news@newhavenbiz.com

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