What going public means for Lantern Pharma

EPM editor Reece Armstrong sits down with Panna Sharma, CEO of Lantern Pharma to discuss what an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of $27 million means for the company and where this biotech is headed next. 

When I first spoke to Panna Sharma in the middle of 2019, I was intrigued by his tenacity to place the company he’d recently joined as CEO, Lantern Pharma, at the forefront of the oncology market. 

During that conversation, Sharma spoke about the need for a change in how healthcare approached treating cancer patients, how precision medicine was key to this approach, and how Lantern’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform RADR, could help identify the drugs that work best against specific types of cancers. 

Earlier this year in June, Lantern Pharma completed an initial public offering (IPO) of almost $27 million to help it achieve its ambitions. During that announcement, Sharma said the industry was entering what he believes “is the golden age of AI’, one in which Lantern clearly wants to operate.

The decision to go public was made in part because it would give “investors and management the best balance of raising capital and retaining control in the company,” Sharma explains.

More so, Sharma explains how Lantern public investors would “over time, appreciate and place more value on the AI component and data component of our story.” 

This makes sense considering Lantern’s USP – accelerating commercialisation by using data to optimise clinical trial populations – is based around a proprietary AI technology, but also due to the interest larger pharma companies are now taking in biotechs. Both small and large-scale biotech acquisitions have taken place this year and last, enabling pharma to focus on R&D and marketing while also securing additional pipelines or innovative technologies. 

For Sharma, he understands that this trajectory is very common for biotechs and makes no secret that it is something Lantern will consider further down the line.

“I’ve always said that I believe that what we’re doing has such powerful capabilities that it will eventually be part of a larger drug development engine or process inside of a much bigger biotech or pharma,” Sharma says. 

And one way to do this, or to at least help the process, is by going public. 

“Another thing being public, all of your operations and financials are fully disclosed and so it makes it a lot easier if someone wants to acquire, merge or conduct other synergistic transactions,” Sharma adds. 

For now though, Lantern is focused on meeting its next major set of milestones and part of this is growing its RADR platform to having 1 billion data points. The company recently hit 450 million data points on a timeline which Sharma suggested was about six months ahead of schedule. 

Indeed, when I last spoke to Sharma last year, the company was aiming to be at 300 million data points in 2020, and at 1 billion in 2021. In 2019, the RADR platform only held around 100 million data points, but Sharma said how even then it could identify what type of person would respond to a drug by generating a “fairly, smart, practical genetic signature,”. 

Now, the growth of the platform means that the company is able to further its goal of predicting which drug combinations work best against specific cancer tumour types. 

How RADR works

RADR - Response Algorithm for Drug Positioning & Rescue - works through a combination of big data and genomics, analysing millions of data points from clinical studies, trials and treatment histories to determine how drugs will work with tumour samples.

It’s these additional data points that the company is pursuing that are essential in order for Lantern to be able to predict potential drug combinations. 

“So that’s one thing we’re seeing is the emerging role of being able to predict combinations of drugs that can be used together. Whether it be our drug and an existing drug that’s already on the market or an existing drug with a new type of compound that will improve its efficacy in cancer patients.”

Indeed, Lantern isn’t just a technology focused company, and has a number of drug candidates for varying cancers in both the pre-clinical and clinical stages of development. Recently, Lantern Pharma announced a collaboration with the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia to further develop its LP-184 drug candidate targeting pancreatic cancer.

LP-184 is part of a family of anti-cancer drug candidates which targets the DNA in cancer cells that express certain biomarkers. In pre-clinical studies, LP-184 has shown significantly enhanced anti-tumour activity as well as substantially reducing toxicity compared to candidates within the same family of drugs and with similar DNA-damage mechanisms. 

Using its RADR platform, Lantern has developed a patient-specific biomarker test to understand how effective the compound will be in certain patients. And all of this fits into Lantern’s goal of rescuing or repurposing small molecule drug candidates or abandoned therapeutic assets that have a history of tolerability or efficacy, but for some reason, haven’t made it to market. 

And while pancreatic cancer is a major market for oncology, Lantern is only targeting patients with specific biomarkers, potentially reducing the commercial feasibility of the company’s drug candidates, due to smaller patient groups. However, Sharma just sees that as another important challenge to overcome.

“My view is that the patients still need the drug and, you know, our job is to find the right route to bring up the compound or drug to the patient,” Sharma says. He goes on to mention how, unfortunately, cancer is still the “number one killer of people” and that purely-market sizing blockades such as size and commercial suitability are only going to hinder progress against the disease. 

However, the pharma industry is a commercial vehicle and Sharma’s hopeful viewpoint needs to be matched by a strategy that produces results within the healthcare ecosystem. Sharma is hoping that Lantern’s approach to personalised medicine can help reduce the massive costs the industry faces when attempting to bring new drugs to market. By stratifying patients into clinical trials designed around their genomic profiles, Lantern can improve a drug candidate’s success rate and also bring down the longevity and costs of clinical trials. 

“That’s one of the powers I see in a new era of data driven drug development is that we can bring things at a cost point that is fundamentally transformed, I mean zeros taken off the end if we do this right,” Sharma says.

Of course, Lantern is sitting in the fast-moving and volatile biotech market, one in which competition is rife. As a company utilising AI, it would be easy to place Lantern alongside the swathes of other companies utilising the technology. Sharma however, says that when you dig into what Lantern is doing, the company is still in a very unique spot. Indeed, Lantern’s engine is entirely its own and the data points mentioned throughout are indicative of a large part of the company’s proprietary data.

Still, going public means that Lantern will face much more visibility now in terms of its successes and setbacks, potentially affecting the company’s stocks and investment. Sharma though, isn’t too worried and says it’s just “part and parcel of being an emerging biotech company.” So, while the stocks are probably going to be volatile, Sharma says his focus will be on what the company controls, which is the RADR platform, how it approaches clinical trials, new compounds and programmes that are launched, and the types of people and expertise it can attract. 

It will be interesting to see where Lantern ends up, especially as a biotech that is so willing to affect change in an industry which is often driven by profit and loss margins, and not by patient outcomes. Now, with the IPO completed, Lantern is seeking additional compounds to pursue, as well collaborators within the biotech space so that it can continue to grow. Watch this space.