Prepping for PhIII cancer study, Sellas reverse merges its way to a public listing
With its one and only cancer drug poised to start a Phase III study sometime later this year, Sellas is getting into the public market game by executing a reverse merger with a post-implosion Galena $GALE.
Just a few weeks ago Galena admitted what quite a few investors had long expected. Its cancer vaccine NeuVax was failing to help breast cancer victims and researchers had to wrap up early, leaving the biotech struggling with a penny stock that had already been pumped up last fall in a 1-for-20 split.

Now Sellas is taking over the company, as well as its pipeline, and reversing its way onto the public market with its WT1-targeting drug galinpepimut-S, which the company plans to study in a long list of cancers. New York-based Sellas has touted Phase II results for their drug, which was in-licensed from Memorial Sloan Kettering.
“This transaction with Galena is an important step for SELLAS and the advancement of our lead product candidate, GPS, through important development milestones,” said Sellas CEO Angelos Stergiou in a statement. “We believe GPS has the potential to benefit a wide range of cancer patients and become an important piece of the cancer immunotherapy treatment landscape as both a monotherapy and in combination with other agents, particularly checkpoint inhibitors. NeuVax strengthens our platform and may provide important value inflections as the clinical trials progress. The combined pipeline, with significant near term milestones, creates multiple development and partnering opportunities to create value as these programs evolve.”