Lineage Cell Therapeutics (LCTX) is a company that I initially found on Renaissance Technologies’ 13F filing. The criteria that I was looking for when I initially found this company was that it needed to be a stock that was under $5 per share, RenTech had lost money on, and RenTech had bought more shares of in the most recent filing. This led me to a lot of companies, but most of them had really rough looking balance sheets. LCTX seemed to have a better looking balance sheet than many of the other companies that met my criteria. This is a biotech company that has a few interesting drugs currently in their pipeline.
The first one is called OPC1. This is a treatment for spinal cord injuries that has had some solid early success. In the current phase, they are trying a new delivery method that would be a lot easier to administer. In previous phases, there is a period of time where the surgeon has to intentionally stop the patient from breathing to reduce the amount of movement when injecting the OPC1 treatment into the spinal cord. If I understand correctly, the idea is that if the new delivery method works, it would not require the patient to be given a different breathing method and would be a lot easier to distribute to more spinal surgeons.
The second one is OpRegen and it is targeting Dry AMD with Geographic Atrophy. I don’t know exactly what that means, but my understanding is that they take stemcells and inject them into or near the optical nerve and are hoping that it helps people with Dry AMD interesting because it is a partnership with Genentech which is another big drug manufacturer. Basically, Genentech is handling the administration of the current phase and has already purchased the rights to distribute the drug if it is effective. I believe there was an upfront payment for this to LCTX and there will be royalties given if it gets through the trials and is still effective. Here is a conversation that I had with chatGPT about OpRegen as well as other treatments for AMD GA: link.
Overall, I didn’t put a huge investment into LCTX, but I wanted to put a little bit of money into it to keep it interesting and to keep watching their pipeline. I will also keep watching what RenTech does with their shares, but am not necessarily going to follow their lead now that I’m in.