MorphoSys AG (MOR)

Since we are talking about our “other” biotech stocks, I wanted to say that I bought a bunch of Morphosys stock $MOR or ADR just before approval. Amazingly enough the pups hasn’t jumped as much as I thought it would. The approved drug targets the same antigen CD19 like the one targeted by Amgen’s blincyto and Kites CAR-T. It was approved on fast track basis because of stellar results in DLBCL and from what I see it’s working as well as the CarT except that it’s going to be much easier to administer and going to be 5 to 10 times cheaper . Imagine that. It is going to be a real threat to CD 19 Car T and will be expanded to pretty much all B cell malignancies. Further it will move to 1st line setting in the next few years. So it’s truly a hidden gem, I have doubled up my position but I have no doubt it will be huge.

My several thoughts about $HGEN and recently announced participation in the BET trial ("big effect trial") funded by NIAID.
1) Lenzilumab selection was based on the compassionate use data, not on the data from the ongoing ph3 trial. This might implicate that probably no interim report data from the ongoing ph3 trial is available, which in turn might implicate that HGEN has problems with fast patients enrolment (similarly to CYDY).
2) It is strange why now a new ph3 trial is started (with 100 patients in each arm) when another ph3 trial (with 300 patients) is already running (started already in May). The novelty regarding this new trial is that a combination of remdesivir+lenzilumab is tested as well.
3) Actually I do not understand why this BET trial with lenzilumab (and not only with lenzilumab) has not started several months ago as soon as promising data from compassionate use has been available. At the same time (around April-May) several other arms of such trial could have been added, including leronlimab from $CYDY (targeting CCR5) or other monoclonal antibodies targeting the same cytokine (GM-CSF) as lenzilumab - i.e. mavrilimumab from $KNSA, otilimab from $MOR / $GSK, and gimsilumab from Roivant.
4) Of course it is a good news for HGEN that NIH is interested in lenzilumab and a bad news for CYDY if leronlimab has not been considered (but this might change). But anyway, if the data from the current leronlimab trials is positive (especially in case that the S/C trial is halted by the ethical committee), there is surely no need to start a new, NIAID funded trial.