MabVax Therapeutics says it doesn’t have enough money to continue funding its operations.
The San Diego biotech company, which is testing an antibody discovery platform intended to speed products to patients with cancer and pancreatitis, said Thursday it has retained a local investment banking firm, Objective Capital Partners, to guide its sale.
As of Sept. 30, the company had nearly $1 million in cash and a working capital deficit of about $6.3 million, according to its latest quarterly regulatory filing. The company lost about $7.3 million in the first nine months of 2018 and $22.8 million in the same period the year prior. It also owes about $2.8 million to Oxford Finance, according to the filing.
And while the company could see as much as $7.6 million in future milestone payments from deals struck earlier this year with Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim International GMBH and Y-Mabs Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:YMAB]]), it doesn’t have the money it needs now to fund the continuation of its work, said David Hansen, MabVax president and CEO, in a prepared statement.
The company’s assets, all in Phase 1 trials for pancreatic cancer, include MVT-5873, a human monoclonal antibody product candidate; MVT-1075, a radioimmunotherapy product; and MVT-2163, an imaging agent.
MabVax (for mAb, the abbreviation for monoclonal antibody, and vaccine) said it wants to complete a sale by January.
The company, founded in 2006, became publicly traded in 2014 through a merger with Palo Alto’s Telik. It executed a reverse stock split to bump up its share price back in 2016, then again this February. The Nasdaq delisted MabVax’s stock in July. The company has been shrinking since at least mid-2017, when it started reducing its headcount from its staff of 25 to six, according to a November filing with securities regulators.
