Kindred Spikes 12% On Vaxart Vaccine Manufacturing Deal

Shares in Kindred Biosciences are jumping 12% after the company announced an expanded manufacturing agreement for Vaxart’s oral COVID-19 vaccine as well as other vaccine candidates. Vaxart is up 4%.

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Kindred (KIN) said that under the terms of expanded agreement, its subsidiary Centaur Biopharmaceutical Services, will be responsible for scaling COVID-19 clinical trial material into mid-size bioreactors at its California plant. In addition, Centaur’s Kansas plant will be used for vaccine manufacturing at 2000L scale in its single use bioreactors.

Vaxart’s (VXRT) COVID-19 candidate is the only oral vaccine to be selected for inclusion in the US government’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS) program. The vaccine candidate has shown promise in pre-clinical trials, with a Phase 1 study expected to begin sometime in 2H20.

Centaur is a full-service contract development and manufacturing organization that specializes in protein-based biologics and virus-based products. Centaur’s capabilities range from cell line development, process development, analytical development, process characterization, clinical manufacturing, to commercial manufacturing including aseptic fill-and-finish.

While Vaxart shares have exploded this year and are up a stellar 1,891%, the stock has seen some selloff by investors over the past 3 months. (See Vaxart stock analysis on TipRanks)

H.C. Wainwright analyst Vernon Bernardino last month maintained a Buy rating on VXRT with a $17 price target (144% upside potential), saying that an oral tablet SARS-CoV-2 vaccine could lower the hurdles in implementing a broad vaccination campaign.

“We believe initiation of first-in-human studies with an oral vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is highly anticipated, as this route of administration, in our opinion, would present significant logistical storage and distribution advantages in the broad and rapid vaccination of the estimated 330M people in the U.S. and the over 7B global population,” Bernardino wrote in a note to investors. “We look for initiation of the Phase 1 study to be a positive catalyst.”

In a bullish note, B. Riley FBR analyst Mayank Mamtani reiterated a Buy rating with a $22 price target and recommended investors take additional advantage of the recent equity pullback.

“We continue to believe VXRT stands out among the second wave of C-19 vaccine makers, in terms of offering a convenient oral dosing enabled by the platform broadly characterized to generate humoral, mucosal, and cellular immunity,” Mamtani wrote in a note to investors.