KURA heads into its June 4 earnings report carrying one of the heaviest short positions in small-cap biotech — and the bears have been adding.
Short interest has climbed to 22% of free float, up from roughly 20% six weeks ago, and is now running near the top of its recent range. The ORTEX short score of 61.9 reflects that sustained pressure. Yet the borrow market tells a less confrontational story: availability is extraordinarily loose at nearly 2,000% of short interest, meaning there are far more shares available to lend than are currently borrowed. Cost to borrow, while up 65% week-over-week, remains negligible at 0.51% — hardly a signal of a tightly contested short. The stock itself has added to the tension, falling 14% over the past week to $8.97, even as it managed a modest 2% recovery over the past month. Peers haven't escaped either — JANX, DYN, and XNCR are all down 4-7% on the week — but KURA's drawdown is steeper, suggesting stock-specific anxiety rather than pure sector rotation.
The central debate is about Komzifti's commercial trajectory. Bears point to the drug's $48,500 monthly price tag and a lengthy time-to-response, both of which create real friction for patient access and payer coverage. The most recent quarterly figures show revenue of $18.3 million growing 29% year-over-year, but cost of revenues of $65.5 million is dwarfing the top line, producing a deeply negative gross margin. That profile puts the spotlight squarely on launch execution metrics — scripts, net selling price, and any update on payer mix. Bulls, meanwhile, lean on a net cash position of roughly $556 million as runway to fund further clinical work and Ziftomenib expansion into additional AML subsets, alongside early-stage pipeline candidates KO-7246 and darolifarnib. Recent analyst moves, with targets concentrated in the $15-$36 range as of mid-April, imply the Street sees meaningful upside from current levels — though several firms trimmed targets in the first quarter, and none of those changes are more recent than six weeks.
On the options side, positioning has ticked slightly more cautious into the print, with the put/call ratio at 0.26 against a 20-day average of 0.21 — modestly elevated but well within normal range and nowhere near the year's defensive extreme of 0.81. That suggests options traders are not aggressively bracing for a large move. Among insiders, the pattern over the past few weeks has been modest selling from the CCO, COO, and Chief Legal Officer — small transactions, low significance scores, and values in the low tens of thousands, consistent with routine share plan activity rather than a directional signal. Institutional ownership is concentrated, with BlackRock at 10.9% and two specialist biotech managers each above 9%.
The June 4 print is therefore a referendum on whether Komzifti's commercial ramp is outpacing the bear case — and whether the cash runway narrative is enough to absorb another quarter of deeply negative gross margins.
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