Dive Brief:
- Because of its recent merger with OnCore on March 4, Tekmira now has a pipeline of eight drugs for hepatitis B (HBV).
- Tekmira has also been developing TKM-Ebola-Guinea for Ebola and TKM-HTG for treatment of severe hypertriglyceridemia.
- On March 25, Tekmira completed an underwritten public offering of common shares in which it raised approximately $152 million.
Dive Insight:
Tekmira has a lot of good news to report, including the synergies created by the OnCore merger in which the companies have merged their staffs and portfolios. For the first quarter of this year, Tekmira reported $4.7 million in revenues, compared with $4.4 million for Q1 2014, and a net loss of $12 million, compared with a net loss of $18 million for Q1 2014.
Tekmira will use the money raised from its public offering to drive products through the development pipeline, while also benefiting from other sources of revenue, such as the $3 million that Tekmira received in Q1 2015 from the Department of Defense for its work on TKM-Ebola.
The company also has partnerships with Monsanto and Dicerna. It's looking as 2015 will be focused more on HBV than Ebola, but given the epidemiology of HBV, the market opportunity is much greater.