ALX Oncology's fiscal second quarter arrived with the company at the strangest point of its short public life: a clinical-stage biotech that nearly ran out of runway in 2025, then spent the first half of 2026 re-arming. Twelve months ago the shares traded near fifty-two cents, the pre-revenue pipeline was being cut back, and a workforce reduction in preclinical research had taken an impairment charge. Then, in February, the company raised roughly $140 million net in a registered offering at $1.57 a share, more than doubling its share count, refinanced its only debt, and poured the proceeds into a treasury of about $153 million that management says funds operations through the first half of 2028. The second quarter, then, is the first look at the reset - and it reads as a company deliberately narrowing its bets to two candidates and slowing its burn to make the clock it just bought stretch.
The headline numbers are a smaller loss, and they are real rather than cosmetic. GAAP net loss narrowed to $18.0 million in the quarter, or $(0.13) per basic and diluted share, from $25.9 million ($0.49) a year earlier; the six-month loss narrowed to $35.9 million ($0.30) from $56.7 million ($1.05). The driver is mostly what management says it is: research and development spending fell roughly $4.9 million in the quarter on lower costs for legacy trials - the ASPEN-06 gastric program wound down after its topline readout and other older studies were pared - even as the two surviving programs, the evorpacept breast-cancer study and the ALX2004 antibody-drug conjugate, kept spending. The year-ago quarter also carried a $3.2 million lease impairment charge from the preclinical reorganization; the current quarter instead booked a small lease gain and a $0.9 million loss on extinguishing the old loan. Strip stock compensation and the one-time items, and the non-GAAP net loss narrowed to $14.3 million from $20.6 million.
But the real story of this quarter is not the smaller loss. It is where the company stands with the cash it raised. The shares now trade near $2.00, roughly three times their fifty-two-week low of $0.64 hit last August, with a market capitalization around $278 million against a $153 million cash pile - so the market is valuing the two clinical assets, after backing out the Treasury balances and the small HSBC term loan, at only about $134 million of enterprise value. That is the bet: the stock is mostly its cash, and the open question named by the valuation is whether evorpacept or ALX2004 proves out in time. Both answers land on a clock - evorpacept's 80-patient topline in mid-2027, ALX2004's initial safety data in the second half of 2026. The recapitalization bought the company to those events. It did not buy it certainty.