What Arcturus Therapeutics Brings to the Fight Against the Coronavirus

Health and Healthcare

Published: March 4, 2020 11:35 am

Last Updated: March 4, 2020 11:36 am

Arcturus Therapeutics Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: ARCT) stock jumped on Wednesday after the company announced that it would be joining the fight against the latest coronavirus. In terms of the specifics, Arcturus announced a partnership with Duke-NUS Medical School to develop a COVID-19 vaccine for Singapore.

The development of a COVID-19 vaccine will be based on Arcturus’s STARR technology and will take advantage of a unique platform developed at Duke-NUS allowing rapid screening of vaccines for effectiveness and safety.

Some quick background: the STARR Technology platform combines self-replicating RNA with LUNAR, a leading nanoparticle non-viral delivery system, to produce proteins inside the human body. Due to superior immune response and sustained protein expression, Arcturus’s STARR Technology is expected to produce a vaccine response at much lower doses compared to traditional mRNA vaccines.

Overall this platform could lead to the ability to treat many more people with a single GMP-manufactured production batch, thereby greatly increasing efficiency and reducing time required to produce sufficient quantities of vaccine for large populations.

Joseph Payne, president and CEO of Arcturus, commented:

We have observed STARR technology in pre-clinical models to be effective at extraordinarily low doses — greater than 30-fold more efficient than traditional mRNA. The Arcturus manufacturing process has been applied in multiple large GMP batches of highly pure RNA in our LUNAR-OTC program. If successful, Arcturus could develop a vaccine capable of vaccinating millions of people for a fraction of the cost of traditional mRNA vaccines.

Arcturus stock was last seen up about 19% at $17.21, in a 52-week range of $4.26 to $18.75. The consensus price target is $20.00.