What Arcturus Therapeutics Brings to the Fight Against the Coronavirus
Arcturus Therapeutics stock jumped on Wednesday after the company announced that it would be joining the fight against the latest coronavirus.
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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.
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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.
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Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics. Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications. A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.
