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SELLAS Life Sciences Group, Inc. SLS

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The bet you're really making is that one of SELLAS's two cancer drugs actually works in a blood cancer called AML, and that a trial reads out well enough to win FDA approval. You're betting on two shots: an older immune therapy, GPS, in a final-stage trial that only reports once 80 enrolled patients have died, and a newer pill, SLS009, that gives its first real efficacy answer at the end of this year. Right now the company holds more cash than ever, about $138 million, enough for roughly four years, while the losses grow and the share count has doubled in twelve months. You pay for a business that has never earned a dollar and sells nothing, valued at $2.6 billion after the stock ran from $1.39 to nearly $16 in a year.

Key data

Price$13.86
52-week range$1.39 – $15.88
P/E, trailing / FY29Eneg / 11x
Price to book19.0x

SLS · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$-1$4$8$12$17 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

SELLAS is a clinical-stage cancer company with no approved product and no meaningful sales. Everything rides on acute myeloid leukemia, a fast blood cancer where most patients relapse. The lead asset, galinpepimut-S (GPS), is a peptide immunotherapy meant to train the immune system against WT1, a protein that leukemia cells carry in abundance; it is being tested as maintenance after a patient reaches a second remission. The second asset, SLS009, is a pill that blocks CDK9, an enzyme leukemia cells lean on, tested in newly diagnosed patients alongside standard therapy. The mechanism for both is standard in the WT1 and CDK9 literature, but no primary paper or trial-registry entry was pulled this run, so treat the science as company-described. There is no moat here yet: the moat is a clinical result competitors cannot copy, and SELLAS does not have one until a trial reads out positive.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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