Wall Street is optimistic that Olema Pharmaceutical could be developing the next major breakthrough breast cancer treatment.
Earlier this month, the company announced promising clinical data for its lead candidate palazestrant, an oral medication that is being evaluated in several trials for estrogen receptor-positive, or ER+, breast cancer.
Shares of the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company are up about 50% this year, and more than 70% over the past three months. Analysts polled by FactSet see plenty of upside ahead for Olema. Their average price target of $23.71 per share suggests the stock could skyrocket about 164% from its last closing price.
Olema was included in CNBC’s recent screen of companies headquartered in San Francisco, with market caps under $500 million, that have captured the market’s interest.
Olema stock performance over the past year.
Investors are bullish on palazestrant ahead of a primary readout from a key clinical trial expected in the second half of 2026. Those results could potentially lead to a submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and subsequent commercialization of the therapy.
“You just have to look at our data. The best way to predict how a drug is going to do, or how a combination of drugs is going to do, is to look at the data produced with that drug or that combination,” Olema CEO Sean Bohen said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.” “I think if [investors] take the time to sit down and look at that, they are going to see that there is a reason for the optimism the analysts have, and certainly for our investigators and the patients.”
Palazestrant is a part of the same therapeutic family as tamoxifen, another estrogen receptor-targeting therapy that was approved in 1997. However, Olema’s drug doesn’t have an agonist effect, which means it doesn’t spark a physiological response elsewhere in the body. Fulvestrant, another therapy in the family, also works to eliminate breast cancer but has distinct limitations given that it is injected, rather than taken orally like palazestrant.
Palazestrant is uniquely designed to shut off the estrogen receptor “all the time and completely … and thereby, delay the progression of the growth of the tumor and keep the disease stable for longer,” Bohen said.
“We’re focusing on the vast majority of patients who are diagnosed with breast cancer, which is the ER, estrogen receptor, positive or two negative population, or about 70%,” he said. “We’re taking one of the oldest validated molecular targets in cancer, the estrogen receptor … and what we’re doing is we’re improving on targeting that particular driver of the growth and proliferation of breast cancer to provide better therapy for breast cancer patients.”
Bohen explained that there have been other attempts to improve upon that, which haven’t really solved the problem. “So that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.
