Health and Healthcare

Why This Analyst Sees Big Upside in COVID-19 Immunotherapy Study

Chris Lange

Published: July 8, 2020 10:18 am

Corvus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CRVS) made a big splash on Tuesday by announcing that it would initiate an early-stage immunotherapy study in patients with COVID-19. This incredible move caught the attention of one key analyst, who sees this stock running much higher.

Corvus initiated a Phase 1 study to investigate a novel immunotherapy approach for patients with COVID-19. This comes after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) review and acceptance of the firm’s investigational new drug (IND) application for the COVID-19 study.

Wedbush reiterated an Outperform rating and raised its price target to $8 from $5, which implies an upside of 53% from the most recent closing price of $5.22.

Wedbush believes that this treatment with CPI-006 could be a compelling strategy to generate robust humoral adaptive immune responses and improve clinical outcome in COVID-19 patients, based on the presented data and given high antiSARS2-CoV-2 antibody titers demonstrated in a recently enrolled patient with COVID-19 with a number of comorbidities.

Although the use of convalescent serum as a therapeutic option for COVID-19 is further along clinically with positive case reports, the boutique brokerage firm believes CPI-006 could be a highly complementary approach. More importantly, it could actually increase the magnitude of the response achieved by recovered patients.

Additionally, Wedbush sees CPI-006 as potentially representing a more accessible approach in the treatment setting versus convalescent plasma therapy, due to scalability challenges of the serum approach.

Look for initial data from Corvus’s COVID-19 Phase 1 study later this year.

Corvus Pharmaceuticals stock traded up about 9% on Wednesday to $5.39, in a 52-week range of $1.01 to $6.88. The consensus price target is $9.20.