Halozyme and argenx Most Recent News

Halozyme and argenx Collaboration

argenx (ARGX) dosed the first subject in phase 1 clinical trial for the safety, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of its product efgartigimod plus Halozyme’s (HALO) drug delivery technology ENHANZE®. The drug aims at treating severe autoimmune diseases including myasthenia gravis (MG), immune thrombocytopenia (ITP)and skin blistering diseases.   

We find it good news that this first clinical trial has been initiated in a relatively short time after the firms first signed the collaborative agreement. Halozyme ENHANZE® technology enables delivering the intravenously administered drug subcutaneously. The potential benefits include reducing medical practitioner’s time by shortening the time of administration and providing a better experience for patients while reducing administration time, injection pain and infusion site reactions. 

The initiation of this study triggers a $5 million milestone payment to Halozyme during the current quarter under the global collaboration and license agreement between the two companies. 

The argenx Drug

Efgartigimod is a first-in-class investigational antibody fragment being evaluated for the treatment of severe autoimmune diseases associated with high levels of pathogenic immunoglobulin G (IgG). Efgartigimod is thought to degrade circulating autoimmune antibodies that cause severe autoimmune diseases. It is being investigated for large and orphan autoimmune diseases including myasthenia gravis (MG), immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) and skin blistering diseases.  

Halozyme in the Prohost Portfolio

Recently, Halozyme has posted positive news which we will be elaborating on in a special Prohost Letter coming soon. In this issue, we will tackle firms in the Prohost Portfolio, including those we believe have breaking news that would make their stocks outperform in the very near future and others that might need a longer time to outshine.

Accordingly, there will be some changes to the Prohost 2019 targets as can be observed in the Prohost Table.

We remind that Prohost picked Halozyme on March 25, 2013 at $6.50. The stock is trading now at $16,76 which is surely less than we expect the stock price to be. We picked HALO based on its novel drug delivery technology and its unique PEGPH20 approach that enables increased access of co-administered cancer drug therapies to the tumor as has been confirmed early in animal models. The  product is now in clinical trials for several cancers and has the potential to be used in combination with different types of cancer therapies that belong to the firm’s own product portfolio and to other partnering large and small drug developing companies including Roche, Baxalta, Pfizer, Janssen, AbbVie, Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Alexion and argenx.

About argenx

argenx develops products with the potential to be either first-in-class against novel complex targets in order to treat diseases with a significant unmet medical need. This capability has enabled by the firm’s proprietary technologies. The firm’s SIMPLE Antibody™ Platform, based on the powerful llama immune system, allows exploiting novel and complex targets and its three antibody engineering technologies are designed to enable expanding the therapeutic index of its pipeline investigational products.

Prohost is following up on this firm and will elaborate on it in a future posting

Stay tuned.

To read more about these firms please run a search from our website by clicking here.

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