Erasca Inc (ERAS) PT Raised to $6 at H.C. Wainwright
H.C. Wainwright analyst Andres Y. Maldonado raised the price target on Erasca Inc (NASDAQ: ERAS) to $6.00 (from $5.00) while maintaining a Buy rating.
The analyst comments "What to expect from the newly initiated SEACRAFT-2 study. Erasca recently announced the initiation of the global SEACRAFT-2 Phase 3 trial to evaluate the pan-RAF inhibitor naporafenib in combination with the MEK inhibitor trametinib for patients with NRAS-mutant melanoma. Our positive outlook on this program is based on recent pooled analyses of patients with NRASm melanoma treated with the combination of naporafenib and trametinib at two different doses, which reported encouraging median overall survival (mOS) of 13.0 and 14.1 months, respectively. Notably, the pooled data at each dose compared favorably with historical benchmarks. The primary reference data for chemotherapy in NRASm melanoma patients comes from the NEMO trial, which included 82% treatment-naïve patients, 16% in the second-line treatment stage, and 2% in the third-line or subsequent stages. For context, the NEMO trial provides the largest and most recent Phase 3 dataset focusing solely on NRASm melanoma patients, offering a relatively homogeneous patient population, with the majority being treatment-naïve. However, a significant limitation is that only 21% of patients had previously undergone immunotherapy (IO). Within the NEMO trial, chemotherapy demonstrated an overall response rate (ORR) of 7%, a median progression-free survival (PFS) of just 1.5 months, and a median overall survival (OS) of 10.1 months. Additionally, the trial showed that the MEK inhibitor binimetinib achieved an ORR of 15%, a median PFS of 2.8 months, and a median OS of 11.0 months. Comparing these results across different trials suggests that combining a pan-RAF inhibitor with a MEK inhibitor could outperform MEK inhibition alone or the standard chemotherapy approach. Therefore, with the start of the SEACRAFT-2 study and the recent in-licensing of both ERAS-0015 (pan-RAS molecular glue) and ERAS-4001 (pan-KRAS inhibitor), we have updated our operating expense assumptions for Erasca while reiterating our Buy rating, and modulate our price target to $6 from $5."