NEW YORK (360Dx) – Celcuity reported after the close of the market on Monday that its net loss for the first quarter of 2018 rose to almost $2.0 million, or $.19 per share.
The figure for the three months ended March 31 compares to a net loss of $987,350, or $.15 per share, in Q1 2017. On an adjusted basis, Celcuity had a net loss of $.16 per share for the recently completed quarter.
The company, which went public in September, posted no revenues for Q1 2018.Â
Celcuity's R&D costs grew 65 percent year over year to $1.5 million from $908,767 in Q1 2017, while its general and administrative costs shot up to $530,640 from $85,144.
The uptick in R&D spending was driven by an increase in compensation-related expenses, expenses related to validation studies in support of the CELx platform, legal expenses associated with patent costs, startup clinical trial costs, and operational and business development activities, Celcuity said.
General and administrative costs went up on compensation-related expenses, professional fees associated with being a public company, and director and officer insurance, it said.
The company finished the quarter with $2.6 million in cash and cash equivalents.
In a statement, Celcuity Chairman and CEO Brian Sullivan said that the firm completed development of its second CELx test for breast cancer. The test evaluates independent c-Met pathway signaling activity and its involvement with HER family signaling in HER2-negative breast cancer tumor cells.
The company plans on combining this c-Met signaling function test with it current HER2 signaling function test to create the CELx Multi-Pathway Test. With the combined offering, Celcuity will offer "an analysis of HER1, HER2, HER3, and c-Met signaling activity with a single patient tumor specimen," Sullivan said.
He added that the firm plans to collaborate with drug manufacturers on clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of combining HER family inhibitors and c-Met inhibitors in breast cancer patients who have normal c-Met and abnormal HER1 pathway activity.
Celcuity calls itself a cellular analysis firm focused on discovering new cancer subtypes and commercializing diagnostic tests to improve the clinical outcomes of patients treated with targeted cancer therapies. The CELx technology directly measures the efficacy of a targeted therapy in a patient's living tumor cells, which enables physicians to confirm that a drug will be functional in the patient's tumor cells before a regimen is begun.