These 3 Biopharma Underdogs Could Show Some Bite Soon

The full slate of the first week of the NFL season kicked off Sunday. As usual, there were some surprises like the Packers throttling the Lions and the lowly Titans forcing Denver to struggle at home. In that underdog spirit, today’s column profiles three small-cap biopharma and biotech names that have more than a puncher’s chance to move up in my portfolio.

Let’s start with Nuvation Bio NUVB, a small-cap biotech company, which I last gave a positive shout out in the first half of June, when the shares were under some undeserved downward pressure. That call turned out to be prescient, as the stock has just over doubled in price since then. Insiders purchased over $1 million worth of the equity soon after my last piece on Nuvation ran.

The company just launched its oral antitumor agent Ibtrozi as a treatment targeting a small subset (around 3,000 diagnoses annually in the U.S.) of patients with non-small cell lung cancer or NSCLC. This followed Food and Drug Administration approval late this spring after the tyrosine kinase inhibitor demonstrated impressive results in late-stage studies. Five analyst firms including RBC Capital and Wedbush reissued Buy ratings on the stock in August. I want to see a couple of quarters of actual sales results from Ibtrozi before adding to my stake. The company, however, appears to have a bright future.

ImmunityBio, Inc. IBRX is a new addition to my portfolio. Last spring, the company’s Anktiva was approved as part of a combination therapy with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine to treat non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMISC) with carcinoma in situ that was not responding to Bacillus Calmette-Guérin. This combination therapy received its medical billing "J code" last year.

ImmunityBio also has a promising developmental program. While the company isn’t expected to be profitable until fiscal 2028 and is burning a lot of cash now, analysts believe it could be close to delivering $1 billion in revenues by then compared to around $110 million in fiscal 2025. The stock does seem to have bottomed recently, although the stock is entering my portfolio with one of the highest risk/reward profiles of my holdings.

I end with Ocular Therapeutix OCUL, an ocular-related small cap that has moved up sharply since I last covered it in March. The "Big Mo" could continue. In August, the Food and Drug Administration gave its blessing to Ocular’s to a registrational trial design for one of Ocular’s developmental assets. In addition, late last week, the stock was buoyed by speculation rumors connecting it as a potential acquisition target to a large French drug maker.

Now let's see when one or more of these three names makes its own touchdown. 

At the time of publication, Jensen was long IBRX, NUVB, OCUL