Financial Analysis: Maze Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MAZE) and Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ:DNLI)

Maze Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MAZE) and Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ:DNLI) are both healthcare companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, dividends, profitability, valuation, institutional ownership, earnings and analyst recommendations.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current recommendations and price targets for Maze Therapeutics and Denali Therapeutics, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Maze Therapeutics	1	0	9	3	3.08
Denali Therapeutics	1	2	13	0	2.75

Maze Therapeutics currently has a consensus price target of $63.40, suggesting a potential upside of 137.81%. Denali Therapeutics has a consensus price target of $35.85, suggesting a potential upside of 94.82%. Given Maze Therapeutics’ stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts plainly believe Maze Therapeutics is more favorable than Denali Therapeutics.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

92.9% of Denali Therapeutics shares are owned by institutional investors. 5.3% of Maze Therapeutics shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 9.7% of Denali Therapeutics shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Volatility & Risk

Maze Therapeutics has a beta of 2.16, indicating that its stock price is 116% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Denali Therapeutics has a beta of 1.02, indicating that its stock price is 2% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Maze Therapeutics and Denali Therapeutics’ 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%
Denali Therapeutics	N/A	-55.27%	-44.24%

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Maze Therapeutics and Denali Therapeutics”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	$167.50 million	8.84	-$131.12 million	($2.52)	-10.58
Denali Therapeutics	$330.53 million	8.90	-$512.54 million	($2.84)	-6.48

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

Summary

Maze Therapeutics beats Denali Therapeutics on 8 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 Denali Therapeutics

Denali Therapeutics Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, develops a portfolio of product candidates engineered to cross the blood-brain barrier for neurodegenerative diseases and lysosomal storage diseases in the United States. The company’s transport vehicle (TV)-enabled programs include DNL310 ETV, an IDS enzyme replacement therapy program for MPS II; TAK-594/DNL593 which is in Phase 1/II for frontotemporal dementia-granulin; DNL126 program for MPS IIIA; and DNL622 for MPS I, as well as other preclinical programs that target amyloid beta and HER2. Its brain-penetrant small molecule programs comprise BIIB122/DNL151 LRRK2 inhibitor program for Parkinson’s disease; SAR443820/DNL788 RIPK1 inhibitor program for CNS disease; DNL343 eIF2B Activator program for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; and SAR443122/DNL758 RIPK1 inhibitor program for peripheral inflammatory diseases. It also provides early stage program include TAK-594/DNL593 program for FTD-GRN; DNL126 program for MPS IIIA, a Sanfilippo Syndrome A; DNL622 for MPS I which is Hurler syndrome; Antibody Transport Vehicle Amyloid beta program; Oligonucleotide Transport Vehicle platform, a novel class of biotherapeutics to address the root cause of diseases through modulation of gene expression; and other TV-enabled discovery programs. The company has collaboration agreements with Biogen MA Inc. and Biogen International GmbH; Genzyme Corporation; Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited; F-star Gamma Limited, F-star Biotechnologische Forschungs-und Entwicklungsges m.b.H, and F-star Biotechnology Limited; and Genentech, Inc. The company was formerly known as SPR Pharma Inc. and changed its name to Denali Therapeutics Inc. in March 2015. Denali Therapeutics Inc. was incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.