Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Biopure is running out of cash, seeks options

By Mass High Tech staff

With only enough cash in hand and expected revenue to last until April, Biopure Corp. reports that it has engaged Newbury Piret & Co. to help it explore “strategic options,” which could include a potential sale or even a bankruptcy filing.

In its Annual Report for the year ending Oct. 31, 2008, Cambridge-based Biopure (Nasdaq: BPUR) noted that it had operating losses in 2008 and 2007 of $20.8 million and $36.9 million, respectively. One of the reasons the losses dropped in 2008 is that Biopure laid off almost its entire staff, existing now with seven employees, including three part-timers -- down from as many as 75 employees in Sept. 2007.

Biopure is also facing delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market. The company states in the Annual Report, filed Feb. 13, that if it doesn’t obtain “financing imminently, it will be forced to cease operations, liquidate its assets, and possibly seek bankruptcy protection.”

At the end of 2008, Biopure received another body blow, this time from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which refused to allow the U.S. Naval Medical Research Center to conduct a clinical trial of Biopure’s Hemopure product. The U.S. Navy had filed for a clinical trial for the resuscitation of operational casualties with severe hemorrhagic shock without availability of blood transfusions.

Biopure develops pharmaceuticals, called oxygen therapeutics, that are intravenously administered to deliver oxygen to the body’s tissues. Hemopure is approved for sale in South Africa for the treatment of surgical patients who are acutely anemic. Biopure’s veterinary product Oxyglobin, the only oxygen therapeutic approved for marketing by both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission, is indicated for the treatment of anemia in dogs.