To me, the main challenge in today’s biotech market is finding good quality assets with attractive valuations. There are definitely a lot of promising programs out there but valuations are often hard to justify as they reflect limited development risk and unrealistic commercial potential. From a risk/reward standpoint, it is hard to get excited about valuations of >$0.5B for companies before clinical proof of concept and $2-5B for clinically validated programs.
From that perspective, Xenon (XENE) is a market anomaly, with two promising clinical stage programs, a robust discovery platform and a market cap of just under $100M. Its two epilepsy programs, XEN1101 (Kv7 opener) and XEN901 (Nav1.6 inhibitor), are still in P1 but at the current levels the upside potential is too significant to ignore. Continue reading