With its Poolbeg Pharma merger plans having bitten the dust and key assets sold off to Gilead Sciences, Hookipa Pharma has decided it’s time to shut up shop completely.
The immunotherapeutics biotech is aiming to get shareholder approval next week for its plans to delist from the Nasdaq and liquidate the company. The move follows Hookipa’s announcement back in May that it was handing over full ownership rights for arenavirus immunotherapies for hepatitis B and HIV to its longtime partner Gilead for $10 million upfront.
Hookipa went public with its plans to delist and wind down in a post-market release July 18, but the company provided an explanation for its decision in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing earlier this month.
The vaccine rights sold to Gilead “constitute substantially all of the company’s assets … and … we have no product candidates that generate revenue,” Hookipa explained in the filing. As a result, the biotech is only planning on retaining “those employees required to wind-up our corporate existence.”
Having reviewed the company’s “financial condition,” Hookipa’s board had decided that “continuing to operate is not reasonably likely to create greater value for the stockholders than … the sale of the company’s remaining assets and the complete liquidation and dissolution of the company,” according to the filing.
On paper, Hookipa’s remaining assets include eseba-vec, an immunotherapeutic agent for HPV16-positive cancers, which is being studied in a phase 2 study in combination with Keytruda for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. However, further clinical development activities “were paused as of November 2024,” according to the July 3 filing.
There’s also HB-700, an immunotherapy for KRAS-mutated cancers that was being lined up for a phase 1 trial.
Hookipa’s decision to wind down follows a tough couple of years for the biotech, including layoffs in 2024 after Roche walked away from a collaboration on the HB-700 program. In February of this year, Hookipa called off its planned merger with Poolbeg Pharma, leaving the rare disease company “surprised and disappointed.”