Days after J&J update, Nanobiotix pauses trading amid €75M stock offering

Paris-based Nanobiotix filed the paperwork for the share offering on Wednesday evening and paused trading of its stock Thursday morning. The pause, which is scheduled to lift later on Thursday, is intended to allow Nanobiotix to confirm allocations to investors and announce the pricing of the stock offering. 

Nanobiotix ended last year with cash and cash equivalents of €52.8 million. The follow-on offering could extend the company’s cash runway into early 2028. Nanobiotix plans to use the money to support development of JNJ-1900 and advance its platforms. J&J licensed JNJ-1900 from the French biotech for $30 million (€26 million) upfront in 2023. 

J&J’s data

The financing and trading pause continued a busy week for Nanobiotix, which shared an update from a J&J-sponsored Phase 2 clinical trial of JNJ-1900 on Sunday. The drug candidate, a radioenhancer also called NBTXR3, is designed to make radiotherapy more efficient by generating reactive oxygen species in tumor cells. 

J&J reported six responses in seven patients with unresectable non-small cell lung cancer who received JNJ-1900. Four patients had complete responses. Citing a Phase 3 trial of AstraZeneca’s PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor Imfinzi, Nanobiotix said fewer than 5% of patients have complete responses on the current standard of care. 

No patients had complete responses in the initial analysis of the seven patients, which took place after concurrent chemoradiotherapy but before treatment with Imfinzi. Nanobiotix framed the deepening of responses over time, plus the absence of progressive disease, as evidence of the potential for long-term durability. However, the biotech cautioned against predicting future results based on the small cohort. 

The JNJ-1900 data cover the first part of a trial designed to enroll up to 130 patients. In the second part of the study, J&J will seek to show proof of concept by comparing two JNJ-1900 doses to the standard of care. 

J&J is running a Phase 3 trial of JNJ-1900 in patients with head and neck cancer. The company recently changed the study protocol, dropping an interim analysis that was previously planned after 283 events and reducing the trigger for the final analysis to 335 events. Nanobiotix said the protocol changes “could accelerate and expand the global registration pathway,” leading to earlier revenue under the J&J deal.