After layoffs leave Oncorus a 'shell' of a company, board liquidates the business
12 Jun 2023
AcquisitionPhase 1
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Source: FierceBiotech
Oncorus’ board previously warned that the company faced "challenges associated with raising additional capital."
A week after Oncorus shed pretty much all its staff, the biotech’s board has decided that the game is up and moved to liquidate the RNA-focused company.
The 55 layoffs announced June 1, which included virtually the entire C-suite, left Oncorus’ fate hanging in the balance, with the company feeling out “all available strategic options” to ward off an “orderly wind down.”
That search appears to have been fruitless, with Oncorus’ board announcing via a Securities and Exchange Commission filing June 7 that it had “unanimously approved the dissolution and liquidation of the company.”
The final nail in the coffin came the next day, when Nasdaq wrote to Oncorus explaining that the layoffs and the dissolution plans meant the biotech is now considered to be a “public shell” and its shares should cease trading on the stock market next week.
The biotech’s board explained in early June that the company faced “challenges associated with raising additional capital … including current market conditions.” But things started to go wrong back in November 2022 when Oncorus canned its herpes simplex virus drug ahead of a planned phase 1 readout from a study in combination with Keytruda in solid tumors. The pipeline contraction came with a head count reduction of 20%, with remaining employees solely focused on developing a self-amplifying RNA candidate dubbed ONCR-021.
The end of the financial road was coming quickly, with Oncorus predicting that the $45 million in cash and equivalents it ended March with would only last until the third quarter of the year.
Oncorus joins a growing list of biotechs who gave up the ghost in 2023, including Sorrento Therapeutics and Athenex, which both filed for bankruptcy, and Vedere Bio II and Vyant Bio, which initiated their own wind-down operations.
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