Olema Oncology will let go of a quarter of its workforce, as well as two top executives, as the biotech works to keep alive work on an experimental breast cancer drug that has so far been a disappointment.

The cuts will affect workers in R&D and corporate functions, the company said in a press release Thursday. Also out are CBO Kinney Horn and Cyrus Harmon, a co-founder of the company and its chief research officer. Harmon will stay as a member of the board. The company had 83 full-time employees as of Jan. 31, according to a financial filing.

CEO Sean Bohen has led the company since he left the top medical spot at AstraZeneca. The job cuts will let the company focus resources on OP-1250, the breast cancer drug that has worked and struggled with to move forward for years.

Given the challenging equity market environment, we made some difficult decisions regarding our organization and earlier-stage programs, Bohen said in the press release.

The company is worth a fraction of its value from when it IPOed in 2020, and the shares were trading around $50 a share. In November 2021, it announced results from its Phase I/II trial of OP-1250 that greatly disappointed investors because of the low response rate in advanced ER+/HER2- breast cancer. The stock plunged and has never recovered, and now trades around $4 a share.

The San Francisco-based biotech says it has enough cash to last into 2025. It reported $204.4 million in cash, equivalents and marketable securities as of the end of last year and a net loss of $104.8 million.

It plans to start a Phase III trial of OP-1250, an estrogen receptor antagonist, in the second half of the year, as a second- and third-line treatment for metastatic breast cancer. And it has Phase II trials that it expects will report out this year, both as a monotherapy and in combination with Pfizers Ibrance.

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Olema Oncology to cut 25% of staff, says it will focus on late-stage ... - Endpoints News