A Florida clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that recently went public has deep ties to Orange County.
Cadrenal Therapeutics Inc. is developing an anticoagulant to prevent blood clots in patients with end-stage renal disease or irregular heartbeats.
“It’s the intersection of kidney failure and cardiovascular disease,” founder and Chief Executive Quang Pham told the Business Journal.
Pham’s company, based in Ponte Vedra, Fla., raised $7 million in its initial public offering (Nasdaq: CVKD). It began trading at $5.71 on Jan. 20 and like many small caps, has had a yo-yo experience, ending at $2.73 and a $30 million market cap at press time.
Its underwriter was Boustead Securities LLC, an Irvine-based firm known for helping small companies go public. Pham has known Boustead founder Keith Moore since the 2000s when they shared an office together in San Juan Capistrano.
“Boustead has gotten IPOs completed in a difficult climate,” Pham said.
Semper Fi
Pham, 58, has a long history in Orange County, dating back to when he was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot flying out of the former Tustin base and serving in the first Gulf War.
He was active in OC business in the 2000s as the founder of MyDrugRep.com, which became Lathian, a venture-backed company that provided online data and marketing services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Lake Forest-based Lathian was sold to D&R Communications LLC in 2012.
Pham, who once ran for Congress, also became well known as the 2005 author of “A Sense of Duty,” a memoir that won the Asian Heritage Book Award.
A Vietnamese refugee, Pham has long been interested in solving the blood clot problem Cadrenal is working on.
His father was imprisoned by the Vietnamese communists for 12 years after the fall of Saigon and eventually made his way to the U.S.
“He died of a stroke” while taking warfarin, the medication used for thrombosis, to battle cancer, Pham said. “I don’t know if that medication caused the stroke, but it caught my interest in 2000.”
Orphan Designation
Pham in 2014 became chairman and CEO of Espero BioPharma, which worked on developing tecarfarin, a novel cardiorenal therapy for the prevention of systemic thromboembolism (blood clots) of cardiac origin in patients with end-stage renal disease, also known as ESRD, and atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat), or AFib.
There are more than 809,000 Americans with ESRD, with approximately 70% on dialysis, Cadrenal said in its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Approximately 150,000 ESRD patients also have AFib, which nearly doubles the anticipated mortality and increases the stroke risk by approximately fivefold in these patients.
After Espero went out of business in 2020 following an unsuccessful IPO, the tecarfarin technology was obtained by Horizon Technology Finance Corp. (Nasdaq: HRZN), a drug investor with a market cap topping $300 million. Horizon then sold tecarfarin to Cadrenal, getting about 5.1% of the latter company as part of the payment.
“They believe in the drug and me,” Pham said.
The drug, which has been tested on more than 1,000 patients, has already won orphan drug and fast track designations. The next stage is to get FDA approval for a Phase 3 trial planned for later this year and if things go well, to have the drug available in 2025, Pham said.
