EL7.AI
StocksMedium•22 October 2026•
3 min read

H.C. Wainwright cuts Aardvark target to $4.00 after trial terminations

Key Facts

1H.C. Wainwright cut its price target for Aardvark to $4.00 from $6.00 and maintained a Neutral rating.
2Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled $73.9 million as of June 30, 2026.
3Aardvark recorded a net loss of $14.4 million in each of the second quarters of 2026 and 2025.
4The company terminated the HERO and open-label extension trials, according to its business update.
5Based on its operating plans at the time of the results announcement, the company expected its resources to fund anticipated operations into late 2027.

H.C. Wainwright cut its price target for Aardvark Therapeutics to $4.00 from $6.00 while maintaining a Neutral rating, according to coverage published by Investing.com on October 19, 2026. The target cut followed the trial terminations, according to the report, marking the firm's latest assessment of the company's trajectory after setbacks in its clinical program. Aardvark had announced the termination of the HERO trial and its associated open-label extension trial in its second-quarter results update. The company had previously disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the Food and Drug Administration had placed a full clinical hold on the investigational new drug application for ARD-101. It said in the filing that the agency "placed a full clinical hold on the investigational new drug application for ARD-101." The program thus went through a company-announced voluntary pause, a regulatory hold and then the termination of both trials, according to its disclosures.

Aardvark attributed its decision to pause voluntarily to cardiac findings that emerged during a study in healthy volunteers at doses above the targeted therapeutic levels. The company described those findings as "reversible" and said they were detected during routine safety monitoring. The announcement hit the stock hard in the March 2, 2026 session, when it fell 56%, according to Investing.com's coverage at the time. The report linked the decline to the company's announcement that it was voluntarily suspending the Phase 3 HERO trial following cardiac safety signals. The drug at the center of the program is an experimental oral treatment that Aardvark says acts primarily within the gastrointestinal tract. It targets bitter taste receptors to stimulate satiety signals between the gut and the brain, according to the company's description of its mechanism of action.

Aardvark had administered the treatment to 68 patients in the randomized, controlled HERO trial as of February 27, 2026, according to an earlier company statement. As of the same date, 19 patients had been dosed in the open-label extension trial. These figures covered participants who received treatment in the 2 trials the company later announced it had terminated in its business update. Regarding the path to regulatory approval, earlier Investing.com coverage cited management as saying the available patient numbers were insufficient to support approval. Management added, according to the report, that a new trial would be required after the HERO and open-label extension trials had ended.

On the financial front, Aardvark reported cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $73.9 million as of June 30, 2026. Its results showed a net loss of $14.4 million in the second quarter of 2026. The net loss in the corresponding quarter of 2025 was at the same level, according to the earnings statement, leaving losses unchanged between the 2 periods. When announcing those results, the company based its estimate of how long its resources could fund anticipated operations on its operating plans at the time. It said it expected those resources to be sufficient "to fund anticipated operations into late 2027."