This Research Originally Appeared on CNA Finance
CORAL SPRINGS, FL / ACCESSWIRE / April 10, 2018 / Genprex, Inc. closed its IPO on April 3, 2018, selling 1.28 million shares of common stock at a price of $5.00 per share, and trades under the symbol "GNPX" (NASDAQ: GNPX). The underwriter has a 45 day option to purchase up to a total of 192,000 additional shares.
For retail investors, the opportunity to find value in GNPX may be significant, relying on the strength of an impressive management team, a defined clinical pipeline, a novel technology platform, and from its exclusive worldwide license agreements with a major cancer research center located in Houston, Texas, to deliver consistent growth. The most likely and near-term opportunity is already emerging through Oncoprex™, the company's lead clinical drug candidate targeting non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a disease that affects more than 1.8 million new patients per year and kills more than 1.6 million people per year worldwide.
From an investment perspective, the value derived from both Oncoprex™ and the company's innovative nanovesicle technology platform may bring significant growth opportunity to small-cap investors. And, the clinical results published thus far provide a logical reason to believe that Oncoprex™ can ultimately position GNPX as a valuable therapeutic provider to the global lung-cancer market, estimated to reach $26.8 billion by 2025.
The Genprex Value Opportunity
Genprex is an active clinical-stage gene therapy company that is developing a new approach to treating cancer, based primarily on its novel and proprietary nanovesicle platform designed to intravenously administer cancer-fighting genes to tumor cells, whereby they express proteins that are either missing or below normal levels. In the Company's lead product candidate, Oncoprex™, the tumor fighting agent, TUSC2, previously known as FUS1 is encapsulated into nanoscale hollow spheres, called nanovesicles. The TUSC2 carrying nanovesicles are injected systemically every 21 days. Oncoprex™ has a multimodal mechanism of action that plays a distinctive and vital role to interrupt cell signaling pathways that cause proliferation and replication of cancer cells, re-establishes pathways for apoptosis, or programmed cell death in cancer cells, and regulates the patient's natural ability to provide a robust immune response against cancer cells.
To generate these potential advances in killing cancer cells, Genprex is taking advantage of its exclusive worldwide license from a major academic research center located in Houston, Texas, for patents covering the therapeutic use of particular genes that have been shown in clinical and preclinical research to have cancer-fighting properties with minimal safety or adverse event risk relative to other lung cancer drugs. Presently, Genprex's investigators are conducting the Phase II portion of a Phase I/II clinical trial of Oncoprex™, targeting non-small cell lung cancer. According to the World Health Organization, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with the disease killing more people than breast, colon, kidney, liver, prostate and skin cancers combined. NSCLC represents approximately 80% of all lung cancers.
Specific to gauging success in the clinical trials for Genprex and Oncoprex™, respectively, the collaboration with a major cancer center in Houston, Texas, is demonstrating the potential to deliver cancer fighting genes, alone or in combination with other therapies, to combat NSCLC, a disease where the five year survival rate of Stage IV patients is about 1%. The results from the collaboration thus far, despite relying on data from a small study population, mark a significant step forward in bringing to market a cancer therapy that potentially can target and kill hard to treat cancers. And, that critical step forward may lead to delivery of needed relief to victims of lung cancer, a disease that in which overall survival has not improved appreciably in the past 25 years. Importantly, as a result of early clinical success, Genprex may be in a position to leverage the Oncoprex™ data and seek fast track, breakthrough therapy, or regenerative medicine advance therapy (RMAT) designation from the FDA to treat existing unmet medical needs, providing substantial catalyst opportunity to investors and a new therapeutic alternative to patients.
