California stem cell biotech, StemCells, Inc. ($STEM), has really struggled for years and its stock is now flatlining raising the question: can it cheat death?
Will 2016 be the year that STEM turns things around?
So far this year hasn’t started off that well. You can see the graph at right from today on the STEM stock price.
Ron Leuty over at San Francisco Business Times reported a couple of weeks ago on a juicy severance package for departing STEM CEO Marty McGlynn despite struggles at the company and layoffs.
I sincerely hope that STEM can bounce back and that its clinical trial work including on spinal cord injury turns out to be successful, but the odds seem to grow longer financially looking to the future barring some big splash of good news soon.
What do you guys think of STEM’s future?
Is StemCells Inc.’s strategic alignment going to help or hurt their prospects?
From their press release:
“strategic realignment to fully focus the Company’s resources on its proprietary HuCNS-SC® platform technology for the treatment of chronic spinal cord injury (SCI)”
“required some difficult choices, including the suspension of the Company’s Phase II Radiant™ Study in geographic atrophy of age-related macular degeneration (GA-AMD)”
“While our programs addressing neurodegenerative diseases and retinal disorders have also shown great promise, we have concluded that the most effective way to accomplish our objective is by concentrating our limited corporate resources on the program with which we are making the most rapid progress — chronic spinal cord injury.”
http://investor.stemcellsinc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=86230&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2124896
If anyone purchases shares in any company, especially unproven research company, are they not hoping that they will make good money. If they do happen to get a real large windfall because the company comes out with some outstanding results, do they then cry out how bad things are??? NO but if it goes the other way they complain that it is the companies fault. It all comes back to RISK and REWARD. Don’t invest if you can’t afford too or if you aren’t prepared to take the chance of making a total lose. Is life not like this from birth to death. I think stem cell research and treatment has a long way to go but IT WILL eventually save or assist millions of people worldwide. It has helped me over the last 6 years and I am sure that if I’m able to get the treatment I wish to have, I will get a much more positive result. Researchers please keep up the great work.
Maybe Astellas will make a tender offer for them as they did for OCATA therapeutics? Those fat checks seem to be in vogue lately!
I wish them the best of luck. It’s a sad thing to see cutting-edge biotech companies struggle.
However, even if worse comes to worst, I’d not despair for their technology platform. Look at Tengion, for instance, they went bankrupt a year ago, however, Celgene picked up their IP on cell therapy for kidney diseases.
Hopefully the same would happen to StemCells inc projects in this worst case scenario, and someone else would pick them up.
Bounce back from what? Expand that chart 20 years and you will see one of the ugliest charts on Wall Street. Stem has blown through over 500mil and has yet to have a trial peer reviewed. Must be nice to be able to steer a company in the worst direction possible and then get a fat check for losing investors millions.