Critical Survey: Kyntra Bio (NASDAQ:KYNB) versus Maze Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MAZE)

Kyntra Bio (NASDAQ:KYNB) and Maze Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MAZE) are both small-cap healthcare companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, institutional ownership, profitability, dividends, analyst recommendations, risk and valuation.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Kyntra Bio and Maze Therapeutics”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Kyntra Bio	$6.44 million	4.45	$183.45 million	$45.30	0.16
Maze Therapeutics	$167.50 million	7.47	-$131.12 million	($2.52)	-8.94

Kyntra Bio has higher earnings, but lower revenue than Maze Therapeutics. Maze Therapeutics is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Kyntra Bio, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

72.7% of Kyntra Bio shares are owned by institutional investors. 4.2% of Kyntra Bio shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 5.3% of Maze Therapeutics shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of recent ratings and target prices for Kyntra Bio and Maze Therapeutics, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Kyntra Bio	1	1	3	1	2.67
Maze Therapeutics	1	0	8	3	3.08

Kyntra Bio currently has a consensus price target of $37.25, indicating a potential upside of 426.87%. Maze Therapeutics has a consensus price target of $66.00, indicating a potential upside of 193.07%. Given Kyntra Bio’s higher possible upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Kyntra Bio is more favorable than Maze Therapeutics.

Profitability

This table compares Kyntra Bio and Maze Therapeutics’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Kyntra Bio	2,199.13%	N/A	-47.27%
Maze Therapeutics	N/A	-34.94%	-30.18%

Volatility & Risk

Kyntra Bio has a beta of 1.06, indicating that its stock price is 6% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Maze Therapeutics has a beta of 2.17, indicating that its stock price is 117% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Maze Therapeutics beats Kyntra Bio on 8 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Kyntra Bio

FibroGen, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, discovers, develops, and commercializes therapeutics to treat serious unmet medical needs. The company is developing Roxadustat, an oral small molecule inhibitor of hypoxia inducible factor prolyl hydroxylases, which has completed Phase III clinical development for the treatment of anemia in chronic kidney disease in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan; and in Phase II/III development in China for anemia associated with myelodysplastic syndromes. It is also developing Pamrevlumab, a human monoclonal antibody that inhibits the activity of connective tissue growth factor that is in Phase III clinical development for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, pancreatic cancer, liver fibrosis, and diabetic kidney disease, as well as Phase III trial for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The company has collaboration agreements with Astellas Pharma Inc. and AstraZeneca AB. FibroGen, Inc. was incorporated in 1993 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About Maze Therapeutics

We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company harnessing the power of human genetics to develop novel, small molecule precision medicines for patients living with renal, cardiovascular and related metabolic diseases, including obesity. We are advancing a pipeline using our Compass platform, which allows us to identify and characterize genetic variants in disease and then link those variants to the biological pathways that drive disease in specific patient groups through a process we refer to as variant functionalization. Our Compass platform has been purpose-built to inform all phases of our drug discovery and development process through clinical trial design. We are currently advancing two wholly owned lead programs, MZE829 and MZE782, each of which represents a novel precision medicine-based approach for chronic kidney disease, or CKD. Our goal is to bring novel precision medicines to patients to maximize our impact on human health. CKD is a serious, progressive condition that affects approximately 37 million patients in the United States, where it is expected to be the fifth most prevalent chronic disease by 2040. Current treatments for CKD consider patients as falling into clinical categories and focus on slowing the progression of disease, but do not target the underlying genetic drivers of disease. Our lead programs are designed to phenocopy, or mimic, the protective effects of certain genetic variants that are associated with reduced disease burden and improved kidney function in distinct groups of CKD patients. Our most advanced lead program, MZE829, is an oral, small molecule inhibitor of apolipoprotein L1, or APOL1, for the treatment of patients with APOL1 kidney disease, or AKD, which is estimated to affect over one million patients in the United States alone. Although the link between APOL1 variants and renal dysfunction has been known for over a decade, we have identified a new protective variant that underpins our therapeutic approach for MZE829 and may ultimately allow us to address a broader population of AKD than has previously been possible in the clinical setting. In October 2024, we reported results for our Phase 1 clinical trial of MZE829, in which we enrolled 111 healthy patients who received either single or multiple ascending doses of 20 mg to 480 mg of MZE829 administered daily. Treatment was well tolerated with no severe adverse events or serious adverse events reported in patients treated with single doses up to 480 mg and multiple doses of up to 350 mg daily for seven days. Dose-proportional pharmacokinetics, or PK, was observed with low variability (10-40%) across doses. We initiated a Phase 2 trial of MZE829 in November 2024 and expect to dose our first patient in the first quarter of 2025 and to report proof of concept data in the first quarter of 2026. Our second lead program, MZE782, is an oral, small molecule inhibitor of the solute transporter SLC6A19, a novel CKD target, with the potential to address approximately five million of the CKD patients in the United States with inadequate responses to currently available CKD therapies. Beyond its use as a potential standalone therapy, MZE782 may also provide a significant benefit to patients in combination with standard of care, including as a complementary treatment to current approved regimens or as an alternative option for those patients who do not adequately respond to today’s standard of care. We initiated a Phase 1 trial of MZE782 in September 2024 and expect to report initial data from this trial in the second half of 2025. In addition to CKD, we believe MZE782 may provide benefit to patients suffering from the genetically defined metabolic disease, phenylketonuria, or PKU. Following our ongoing Phase 1 trial of MZE782, we plan to conduct a parallel Phase 2 clinical trial to explore MZE782 as a potential treatment of PKU. Our Compass platform supports end-to-end variant identification and functionalization capabilities as well as advanced research tools and methodologies for drug development. We believe the process of variant functionalization, or understanding how genetic variants function to affect the course of disease, is a foundational aspect of precision medicine and one of the core capabilities that sets us apart from others in the field. We were incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware on August 29, 2017, originally under the name Genetic Modifiers NewCo, Inc. We changed our name on July 5, 2018 to Modulus Therapeutics, Inc. and on September 25, 2018, to Maze Therapeutics, Inc. Our principal executive offices are located at 171 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 300, South San Francisco, California.