Affymax, Inc. (OTCMKTS:AFFY) Crashes After Losing Partner
Yesterday’s market session was a real disaster for Affymax, Inc. (OTCMKTS:AFFY). Once the 8-K announcing that the partnership AFFY had with Takeda has been terminated affected the market, the company lost 54.55% of its share price over the span of a sngle session.
The fact that AFFY opened 50% down from the very start of the session and was stuck there all day long is indicative of the crisis in investor trust that the company is experiencing now. And who could really blame investors for being doubtful of AFFY, after all the company has put them through?
To elaborate – some years ago, AFFY was one of the more promising biotech companies on the OTC. It had intellectual property, strong partners, funded its operations successfully, and even managed to deliver a product on the market. This is the ultimate goal of all the companies in the branch, and is something many of them fail to do, but as AFFY‘s experience shows, just because a company has reached the marketing stage it doesn’t mean that it is home-free.
Unfortunately for AFFY enthusiasts and clients alike, the “Omontys” product turned out to be a failure and had to be recalled from the market due to post-marketing reports. It turned out that some patients had “experienced serious hypersensitivity reactions to the product, including anaphylaxis, which can be life-threatening and even fatal”.
Needless to say, that really rocked AFFY‘s boat – the company had been stuck in the development stage for quite some time, and when it lost its breakthrough product, it looked like it was going to be thrown back to square one. The worst part of the whole ordeal was that as of March 31, 2014, AFFY had an accumulated deficit of $559.6 million – which is a tremendous amount of loss, even for an unsuccessful biotech company.
Still, AFFY‘s current financial situation didn’t look all that horrifying – it had plenty of cash on hand, little in the way of liabilities, manageable quarterly net loss for the last quarter. Even as bad as it was, the situation appeared salvageable, with the help of the company’s partners. Many believed that with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work AFFY still had a fighting chance. That was until Takeda announced that it is terminating its 2006 agreement with AFFY, effective as of September 10, 2014.
Yesterday’s crash clearly shows that said termination was the last straw. AFFY has been in big trouble for some tine now, and now that it has became obvious that there is no help coming, investors have clearly decided to abandon ship. And they were probably right to do so, because although AFFY may have a chance to recover and take another swing at commercial success, presently it is unknown when it will be able to dig itself out of the hole it is now in.
Another biotech company that was on the decline yesterday was OncoSec Medical Inc. (OTCMKTS:ONCS), whose fall certainly wasn’t as dramatically as AFFY‘s, but still cost ONCS 6.45% of its share value.
