Introduction:
Bicycle Therapeutics is a UK-based pharma company working on precision-guided therapeutics that penetrate deep into tissues and target cancer cells. The company is currently valued at $1.55 billion and has a few drugs in the pipeline, that said we will only focus on "BT8009" also known as "Zelenectide pevedotin" because this is the crucial one.
Pipeline: https://www.bicycletherapeutics.com/pipeline/pipeline/
The company has a strong balance sheet with $918m net cash if we subtract the debt.
Zelenectide Pevedotin formerly known as BT8009:
The drug is an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) currently in phase 2/3. It targets the nektin-4 molecule that is overexpressed in cancer cells. The drug enters the cancer cell, binds to nektin-4 and releases the toxin that then kills the cell.
The company Seagen (now owned by Pfizer) developed the first ADC that made it to market called "Padcev". Padcev made them almost $400m last quarter, this means this one drug will make them about $1.2 billion a year, which translates to $900m in net profits assuming a 75% profit margin.
In a press release posted in May 2024 ( https://investors.bicycletherapeutics.com/news-releases/news-release-details/bicycle-therapeutics-present-pharmacokinetic-and-safety ) Bicycle Therapeutics releases some study results that show that BT8009 is better than Padcev in many ways. This means that if this drug gets to market it will be able to directly compete with Padcev and any other cancer drug of this type.
The risk/reward:
The obvious risk is that there are some unknown sideeffects that come to light and the drug does not get approved and the stock tanks -60% in one day. The current failure rate of phase 3 cancer drugs is around 50%.
If the drug gets approved the company is probably worth $15 billion or more, that translates to a $200+ share price.
Conclusion:
Essentially its a coinflip: 50% chance i lose 60% of my investment or 50% chance i make 10 times my money. Thats a bet I take all day.
Disclosure: I am personally long the stock, my cost basis is around $22 per share.
Bicycle Therapeutics (BCYC) is a tenbagger
byu/drunk_FBI-agent inwallstreetbets
Posted by drunk_FBI-agent
24 Comments
What’s the likely timeline of this coin flip resolving?
Someone just tell me when they test the drugs or whatever so I know what date to buy my calls for
Incredibly intriguing. I too love to invest in a company that can cure cancer.
I remember studying targeted therapy 7-8 years ago in molecular biology, it’s definitely come a long way. Their Bicycle program is very interesting, I’m in 
Deep penetration? Im in
Tons of ADCs around. Mostly disappointing efficacy outside of the clinical trials. What makes this different?
I’ve been hurt before.
Good luck to you!
“The current failure rate of phase 3 cancer drugs is around 50%”
Source- sounds better than the actual 2% that make it.
You forgot the risk of approval in your calculation
pfft yeah i’m gonna get my drugs from a BICYCLE company
what next? cars from sauve automotive?
Every biopharmaceuticals company is a ten-bagger or a bankruptcy case.
Source: 20 years burning money on this stuff
(Prime example of me: Amarin calls, Synergy Pharmaceuticals with good test results but went bankrupt, brainstorm cell therapeutics, Immutep, Red Hill, Protalix, Gamida Cell, Vanda, Mannkind and Cord Blood America, and countless straddles with no outcome or delay of FDA decisions).
Except Gamida, everything lost money.
This Drug isn’t even Phase 3. Says Phase 2/3. What regarded shit is this.
Easy ten bagger, just like OP’s mom.
Here’s the thing with cancer. The cure has 100% been invented already.
The founder of bicycle actually won a nobel prize for developing the humira antibody, which used to be the best selling blockbuster drug for a long time. I saw him give a talk a few years ago, he is a great guy and was very eager to talk about his new projects at bicycle. If he will strike gold again? Who can say. But I’m strongly considering investing.
!remindme 15 years
Puts on Reddit, word is they only push negative comments on podcasts they disagree with. See Rogan
I’ve lost a lot of money betting on cancer drug trials
Low volume stock OP is trying to pump and dump
Fucking evil 75% margin on cancer drugs. The cure for cancer is to live a life free from chemical, physical, and emotional stress.
Fuck all biotechs.
I’ve been fucked by CRSP and Humanigen, good luck to anyone who invests in Bio – you need balls of steel
It’s cheaper to go in $AUTL as they will be getting commercial license in November
Nectin-4 is a popular target these days; overexpressed in bladder but also breast, pancreatic, esophageal, nsclc.. it’s a surface protein/transmembrane glycoprotein, meaning that no internalization is actually required to bin initially. The ADC modality of course will rely on internalization to let go of its chemo payload
Question would be why precisely you’d concentrate on the ADC portion. Personally. I think their radioconjugates will be much more interesting. The radiotherapeutics space has experienced some very significant (7-8 bn in purchases by bms, Lilly, AZ, (Bayer) just to catch up with Novartis)
And while those programs are still in preclinical, they will be very interesting as they do not need any internalization of using alpha or beta emitting particles.
Where do you think will EV (Padcev) expand to first? Will any other nectin-4 targeting ADC have a good reason to be used after padcev has already built significant real world evidence vs a bicycle tx me-too?
Nectin 4 is a plasma membrane protein, so it would bind b4 penetrating into the cell. Most ADCs target extra cellular proteins because antibodies don’t really penetrate on their own.
That being said, it’s a pretty good target. Lowly expressed in healthy tissues, which is more than can be said for a lot of ADCs. More expression of a target on healthy cells = more risk. For everyone’s reference, my first go to database to answer this question is protein atlas.
Looks promising but ADCs always carry the risk of losing their payload (don’t we all) and losing all selectivity. Pay attention to the prevalence of similar toxicities in these clinical trials versus those of the payload alone.
No use trying to predict how clin trials will go. If that were possible, the failure rate wouldn’t be so high. No one knows the drug better than the scientists developing it. If it was obvious what direction a drug would go in trials, those developing it would make better bets on investing in 8-9 figure clinical trials.