Hiroshi Watanabe Investment Overview - ProKidney Shows Promise, Then Stock Price Tanks ProKidney ( NASDAQ: PROK ) went public last week following a business combination with the Special Purpose Acquisition Company ("SPAC") Social Capital Suvretta Holdings Corp. III. As a reminder, a SPAC is a company that achieves a listing solely in order to invest in / merge with a private company, helping that company list in a "light touch" regulatory fashion.
SPACs trade at a value of $10 per share, and have two years to find a suitable company to merge with, or face delisting. ProKidney operates in an intriguing space. According to its Q1 2024 quarterly report / 10Q submission: Our lead product candidate, rilparencel (which we sometimes refer to as REACT), is designed to preserve kidney function in a Chronic Kidney Disease ("CKD") patient's diseased kidneys.
Rilparencel is a product that includes autologous Selected Renal Cells ("SRC") prepared from a patient's own (autologous) kidney cells. SRC are formulated into a product for reinjection into the patient's kidney using a minimally invasive outpatient procedure that might be repeatable, if necessary. Because rilparencel is a personalized treatment composed of cells prepared from a patient's own kidney, there is no need for treatment with immunosuppressive therapies that are required during a patient's lifetime when a patient receives a kidney transplant from another, allogeneic donor.
This type of approach is more broadly known as "ce.
