Pliant follows in the footsteps of Acelyrin, which also enacted a stockholder rights program on Thursday to protect shareholders against Tang Capital’s growing stake in the company.
Pliant Therapeutics on Thursday launched a limited-duration stockholder rights program—commonly known as a “poison pill defense”—just days after Kevin Tang’s Concentra Biosciences snapped up a sizeable stake in the California-based biotech.
Under the defense strategy, shareholders will be able to purchase additional shares of Pliant’s common stock at a 50% discount. The poison pill also assures stockholders that if a so-called “unapproved” company purchases at least 10% of Pliant’s stock and then acquires or merges with the biotech, shareholders would be entitled to buy shares of this theoretical, new third-party company at a 50% discount.
The stockholder rights program is set to expire on March 11, 2026, at the latest, as per Thursday’s news release.
In adopting the poison pill, Pliant follows in the footsteps of Acelyrin, which on Thursday also initiated a stockholder rights plan, explicitly to protect its stockholders from the “continued and rapid accumulation” of the biotech’s shares by Tang Capital Partners. The investment firm has, in recent weeks, been growing its stake in Acelyrin, reaching 8.8% shares on Monday.
In Pliant’s case, while the biotech did not refer to any specific “unapproved” company, it enacted the poison pill defense just days after Tang Capital carved out a 9.6% stake in the company—just shy of the 10% threshold set in the stockholder rights program.
Kevin Tang, who owns Tang Capital, is known for this aggressive type of maneuver, often with sights set on a struggling biotech. In December 2023, for instance, Tang’s Concentra Biosciences filed an unsolicited proposal to acquire LianBio, which just days later rejected the offer, saying that it undervalued the biotech. LianBio ultimately shut down last month.
Pliant has similarly run into a rough patch, with the biotech last month being forced to suspend its Phase IIb/III BEACON-IPF study, which was testing the integrin blocker bexotegrast for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Pliant at the time did not reveal the exact reason for the pause, though it did assemble a panel of external and independent experts to review the study’s data to determine the best development path forward for bexotegrast.
Earlier this month, Pliant announced that it would discontinue BEACON-IPF after a data review found an imbalance in adverse events in patients treated with the candidate.
Compounding Pliant’s woes is Novartis’ decision last month to turn its back on the companies’ metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis candidate PLN-1474. Pliant and Novartis first linked up in 2019, and despite losing a powerhouse partner, Pliant continues to assess its options for PLN-1474, including another partnership.
