In these financially straitened times, biotechs need to be increasingly ruthless about which programs they can afford to keep funding. For oncology-focused Sonnet BioTherapeutics, that means halting work on a bispecific molecule while seeking partners for two others.
It’s no surprise that some belt-tightening is required. The company had just $3.1 million in cash as of the end of September, although it has since raised $4.6 million from selling shares to brokerage firm BTIG.
It’s in this context that Sonnet CEO Pankaj Mohan, Ph.D., committed to “significant operating expense reductions of approximately 30% in accordance with our prioritization goals.”
These reductions won’t start until the second quarter of next year, Mohan said in the company’s fiscal-year earnings release. In the meantime, the company has halted work on SON-3015, a bispecific molecule that had previously been on track to enter mouse studies in the second half of this year.
“As we move into the 2023 calendar year, in addition to our continued focus on funding the company, we will look to establish cost savings by reducing expenditures on tertiary programs, such as SON-3015, which is being placed on a development hold,” Chief Financial Officer Jay Cross said in the release.
“In the cases of SON-1210 and SON-1410, work continues and will pivot around potential partnership interest, as the compounds advance towards the clinic,” Cross added. “With collaborations in place, we will be in a position to further evaluate our operating expense infrastructure.”
The company expects to apply in the first half of next year to enter SON-1210, a bispecific combination of interleukin 15 (IL-15) and IL-12, into human trials, with plans to begin mouse studies for SON-1410, a combination of IL-18 and IL-12, by the end of 2023.
Elsewhere, the company highlighted that it had initiated two phase 1 trials this year of its potential solid tumor therapy SON-1010 that Sonnet said yielded encouraging initial safety data. A phase 1b/2a trial of SON-080 in patients with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy is expected to read out in the first half of next year.
SON-1010, SON-1210 and SON-1410 will all be evaluated in combination with certain Janssen cell therapies as part of a collaboration with the Johnson & Johnson unit signed at the end of October.