Wall Street is optimistic olema pharmaceutical We may be developing the next breakthrough breast cancer treatment.
Earlier this month, the company announced promising clinical data for its lead candidate Parazestrant, an oral drug being evaluated in several trials in estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer.
Shares of the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company are up about 50% this year and more than 70% in the past three months. Analysts surveyed by FactSet see a lot of positives ahead for Olema. The average price target is $23.71 per share, suggesting the stock could jump approximately 164% from its previous closing price.
Olema was included in CNBC’s recent review of San Francisco-based companies with market caps of less than $500 million that are of interest to the market.
Olema stock performance over the past year.
Investors are bullish on ParaZestrant ahead of initial results from a pivotal clinical trial expected in the second half of 2026. These results could lead to an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and subsequent commercialization of the therapy.
“You just have to look at our data,” Olema CEO Sean Bowen said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.” “The best way to predict what a drug will do, or what a combination of drugs will do, is to look at the data that has been generated for that drug or that combination.” “I think if[investors]take the time to look at it, they’ll see that there’s reason for analyst optimism, and certainly for our researchers and patients as well.”
Parazestrant is part of the same family of drugs as tamoxifen, another estrogen receptor-targeted therapy approved in 1997. However, Olema’s drug has no agonist effect. That is, it does not cause a physiological response in other parts of the body. Another similar treatment, fulvestrant, also works to eliminate breast cancer, but it has clear limitations given that it is an injection rather than taken orally like parazestrant.
Palazestrant is uniquely designed to “constantly and completely block estrogen receptors, thereby slowing the progression of tumor growth and stabilizing the disease for longer,” Bowen said.
“We’re focusing on two populations, the majority of patients diagnosed with breast cancer: ER, estrogen receptor positive or negative, or about 70%,” she said. “We’re taking one of the oldest validated molecular targets in cancer, the estrogen receptor… and what we’re doing is improving targeting of specific drivers of breast cancer growth and proliferation to provide better treatments for breast cancer patients.”
Bowen explained that there have been other attempts to improve this, but none of them really solved the problem. “So that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.
