A Biotech's Final Act: Oncternal Sells Its Legacy and Fades to Black

Oncternal Therapeutics has sold its crown-jewel cancer programs, zilovertamab and ONCT-808, to Ho’ola Therapeutics.
The San Diego-based company is ceasing all operations and handing control to a specialist in corporate dissolution.
The future of its promising ROR1-targeted therapies, born from UC San Diego research, now hangs in the balance.

In a stunning move that marks the end of an era, San Diego's Oncternal Therapeutics is shutting its doors, selling off its most promising cancer-fighting assets as it prepares to wind down operations. The company has transferred its innovative ROR1-targeting programs—the monoclonal antibody zilovertamab and the CAR T-cell therapy ONCT-808—to Ho’ola Therapeutics [User text, 1, 7].

These therapies, which emerged from pioneering research at UC San Diego, represented a new front in the war against aggressive and hard-to-treat blood cancers like mantle cell lymphoma and CLL [3, 7]. But despite their scientific promise, the brutal financial realities of drug development, marked by mounting losses and a challenging cash position, have forced a final, heartbreaking decision [2, 6, 8].

For a mere $3 million upfront, Ho’ola Therapeutics now holds the keys to this medical legacy, with Oncternal's former stakeholders left to hope for a potential $65 million in future milestone payments that are entirely dependent on Ho'ola's success [User text]. In a somber final act, the company's board and employees have resigned, replaced by a single director whose expertise lies not in discovering cures, but in overseeing corporate dissolutions [User text]. The lights at Oncternal have gone out, but for patients, the hope is that the science will live on.

A Biotech's Final Act: Oncternal Sells Its Legacy and Fades to Black

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