Peel Hunt reiterated its ‘buy’ recommendation on shares in Faron Pharmaceuticals Limited (AIM:FARN, OTC:FPHAF) in the wake of an accelerated fundraiser that brought in €8.4mln of new cash that will be used to fast-track the company’s cancer programme.
Shares in the London and Helsinki-listed group nudged 10p lower to 165p, though this looks to be a purely technical readjustment anticipating the issue of new stock.
Peel, the company’s corporate broker, reckons the shares are worth 524p each.
In a note to clients following the accelerated book build fundraiser, analyst Miles Dixon called the latest batch of data from the company’s early-phase MATINS clinical trial very promising.
It showed that the Faron drug, called bexmarilimab, significantly extended overall patient survival rates across a range of hard-to-treat, late-stage tumours.
“Given that patients in Faron’s trial had exhausted all other treatment options, prior to the point of receiving bexmarilimab, and had a very bleak prognosis we believe the survival data gathered to date (in MATINS) is very promising,” said Peel analyst Dixon.
The drug works by ‘dialling back’ anti-inflammatory sentinels that tumours use to hide from the immune system.
The current batch of immuno-oncology drugs takes a different, less sophisticated tack – they ‘dial-up’ the response from T-cells, which are immune system first responders to diseases such as cancer.