Atreca reports Q4 EPS (55c), consensus (59c)

Reports that as of December 31 cash and cash equivalents and investments totaled $70.5M. Research and development expenses for the year ended December 31 , were $66.8M, including non-cash share-based compensation expense of $7.9 million. Research and development expenses for the three months ended December 31 were $13.8M, including non-cash share-based compensation expense of $1.3M."Last year was a productive time for Atreca, with advances made in our discovery platform, preclinical programs, and ATRC-101," said John Orwin, Chief Executive Officer of Atreca. "Today we are pleased to report additional data from our ongoing Phase 1b trial, which show that ATRC-101 continues to be well tolerated, and that longer progression free survival was observed in patients with high target expression in this early trial. Patient enrollment based on target expression is ongoing in both the monotherapy and combination cohorts of the study and we expect to report additional data and go/no-go decisions for Phase 2 development toward the end of this year." "We believe these data further validate the ability of our proprietary platform to identify potentially valuable therapeutic antibodies against novel targets in oncology," Mr. Orwin added. "Continued investments in our discovery platform have accelerated the growth of our preclinical pipeline, and we look forward to nominating our next two clinical candidates later this year."