CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP 1.08%) disappointed the market today with its third-quarter results, due in no small part to a dramatic but expected flip into the red on the bottom line.
For the quarter, the company's collaboration revenue withered to roughly $148,000, from the year-ago figure of nearly $212 million. The extreme fall was due to the fact that in the year-ago quarter, the clinical-stage company received development funds from longtime partner Vertex that comprised the vast bulk of its revenue.
Image source: Getty Images.
For similar reasons, CRISPR posted a loss in this most recent quarter. This amounted to almost $92.6 million, or $1.32 per share, against the year-ago net profit of $138.4 million.
Neither headline figure met analyst expectations. According to data compiled by Yahoo! Finance, on average, prognosticators tracking the stock were expecting nearly $2.1 million in revenue, and a per-share net loss of only $1.18.
CRISPR's earnings release comes shortly after the company, which specializes in therapies based on gene-editing techniques, made headlines for its off-the-shelf T-cell therapy CTX110. While the company reported some quite promising results in the early-stage trial for CTX110, this was marred by the death of a participant several weeks after he received a relatively high dosage of the treatment. Clinical-stage biotech stocks like CRISPR tend to be very sensitive to negative developments such as this, and shares took a serious hit despite those positive results detailed in the research.
Regardless, investors aren't particularly bullish on the company these days. On Wednesday, they bid the company's stock down by 3.5%, a steeper fall than that of the S&P 500 index.
