Sonnet Bio Spikes 70% In Pre-Market On FDA Covid-19 Plasma Nod

Sonnet BioTherapeutics (SONN) is spiking 70% in Monday’s pre-market trading on news that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has granted an emergency authorization to use blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients as a treatment for the disease.

“On the therapeutics front… in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives, the FDA has issued an emergency use authorization – and that’s such powerful term, emergency use authorization – for a treatment known as convalescent plasma,” President Trump said at a press briefing.

He added that the therapy “transfuses very, very strong antibodies from the blood of recovered patients to help treat patients battling a current infection” and the authorization will “dramatically expand access to this treatment.”

Meanwhile Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called the authorization a ‘major advance’ in treatment, stating: “We saw about a 35% better survival in the patients who benefited most from the treatment, which were patients under 80 who were not on artificial respiration.”

Reuters also reported that the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Peter Marks, said on a conference call: “It appeared that the product is safe and we’re comfortable with that and we continue to see no concerning safety signals.”

Shares in Sonnet are trading down 83% year-to-date, but Chardan Capital’s Keay Nakae recently published a bullish buy rating on the stock with a $7 price target (166% upside potential).

He notes that Sonnet’s platform was envisioned to facilitate plug and play development of new compounds. The key feature is the ability to effectively harness human serum albumin (HSA) as a therapeutic delivery vehicle.

Sonnet’s FHAB (Fully Human Albumin Binding) construct contains a binding domain that is specifically designed to piggy-back onto HSA for transport to tumors and sites of inflammation.

“Utilizing a modular design approach, their core scFv does not need to be reconfigured, while different payloads can be linked (utilizing a proprietary linker technology) to either end of it to form unique therapeutics, enabling flexible bi-specific functionality” the analyst wrote.

Now Keay Nakae expects Sonnent to complete additional important preclinical studies during the second half of this year. This will include evaluation of SON-1010 (for undisclosed solid tumors) in a humanized mouse model, with data expected in early 4Q20, and non-GLP toxicity in non-human primates, with data expected towards the end of 2020.