Maze Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MAZE) & Alumis (NASDAQ:ALMS) Critical Analysis

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

Volatility and Risk

Maze Therapeutics has a beta of 2.16, indicating that its stock price is 116% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Alumis has a beta of -0.38, indicating that its stock price is 138% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Maze Therapeutics	N/A	-34.94%	-30.18%
Alumis	-5,933.46%	-93.15%	-74.50%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent recommendations for Maze Therapeutics and Alumis, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Maze Therapeutics	1	0	10	3	3.07
Alumis	1	1	11	1	2.86

Maze Therapeutics currently has a consensus target price of $64.45, suggesting a potential upside of 104.75%. Alumis has a consensus target price of $33.27, suggesting a potential upside of 394.39%. Given Alumis’ higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Alumis is more favorable than Maze Therapeutics.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Maze Therapeutics and Alumis”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Maze Therapeutics	$20.00 million	87.43	-$131.12 million	($2.52)	-12.49
Alumis	$7.40 million	117.75	-$243.32 million	($3.86)	-1.74

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

Summary

Maze Therapeutics beats Alumis on 9 of the 13 factors compared between the two stocks.

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.

About Alumis

Our mission is to significantly improve the lives of patients by replacing broad immunosuppression with targeted therapies. Our name, Alumis, captures our mission to enlighten immunology, and is inspired by the words “allumer”-French for illuminate-and “immunis”-Latin for the immune system. We are a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company with an initial focus on developing our two Tyrosine Kinase 2 (TYK2) inhibitors: ESK-001, a second-generation inhibitor that we are developing to maximize target inhibition and optimize tolerability, and A-005, a central nervous system (CNS) penetrant molecule. ESK-001 has demonstrated significant therapeutic effect in our Phase 2 program in patients with PsO, which we define as moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis (PsO), and is currently being evaluated in an additional Phase 2 clinical trial in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), for which we expect to report results in 2026. With the favorable results in our Phase 2 clinical trial in PsO, we intend to initiate multiple Phase 3 clinical trials of ESK-001 in the second half of 2024 in this indication. TYK2 genetic mutations are associated with a strong protective effect in multiple sclerosis, motivating us to develop our second product candidate, A-005, as a CNS-penetrant, allosteric TYK2 inhibitor for neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. In April 2024, we initiated our Phase 1 program of A-005 in healthy volunteers and expect to report initial results by the end of 2024. We utilize our proprietary precision data analytics platform, biological insights and team of experienced research and development experts to deepen our understanding of disease pathologies, accelerate research and development and increase the probability of clinical success. Our collective insights informed our selection of TYK2 as the target for our two lead programs. Beyond TYK2, our proprietary precision data analytics platform and drug discovery expertise have led to the identification of additional preclinical programs that exemplify our precision approach. We recognize that patients living with immune-mediated diseases need alternatives to currently available therapies. Despite recent advances and innovations in the treatment of immune-mediated diseases, many patients continue to suffer, cycling through currently approved therapies while looking for a solution that alleviates the debilitating impact of their disease without life-limiting side effects. Addressing the needs of these patients is why we exist. We are pioneering a precision approach that leverages insights derived from powerful data analytics to select the right target, right molecule, right indication, right patient, right endpoint and right combination to dramatically improve patient outcomes. We believe that combining our insights with an integrated approach to drug development will produce the next generation of treatments to address immune dysfunction. We were founded in January 2021 as a Delaware corporation under the name FL2021-001, Inc. We changed our name to Esker Therapeutics, Inc. in March 2021, and subsequently to Alumis Inc. in January 2022. Our principal executive offices are located at 280 East Grand Avenue, South San Francisco, California.