A medical biotech company that not all that long ago was promising to bring a giant production facility and hundreds of new jobs to Greensboro abandoned those plans and, this week, ProKidney stock – which was selling at $13 a share in August of 2023 – closed on Tuesday, April 15, at under a dollar a share, 71 cents a share to be exact.

The spectacular fall of the stock price is indicative of what happened to the once huge project plan that had Greensboro leaders very excited and had the city, Guilford County, the State of North Carolina, and even Duke Energy, promising the company millions in incentives for ProKidney to make its supposed wonder cure for kidney disease in a nearly half-billion-dollar facility in Greensboro.

Here’s a little of what the Rhino Times wrote in June of 2023 about the company: “ProKidney announced Tuesday, June 13, that it would indeed be making a $458 million investment to establish a cutting-edge biomanufacturing facility in Greensboro. In May, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners voted to offer ProKidney up to $15.3 million in economic incentives to build a facility and bring 330 jobs with an average yearly salary of $74,600 to Greensboro….And in June, the Greensboro City Council, with little fanfare, voted to offer ProKidney up to $13.2 million in economic incentives.

At the time, Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan said, “These are very well-paying jobs in biotech, something we are not really known for.”

And, unfortunately, it is something Greensboro will still not be known for going forward.

Late in 2024, Greensboro Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Brent Christensen issued the following statement: “We understand that ProKidney’s new leadership has refocused the company and will no longer pursue its planned manufacturing facility in Greensboro at this time. We certainly wish ProKidney well in the future, and we will work with company officials to find a new buyer for their Greensboro building.”

Christensen noted at that time that no incentives had been paid to the company by any government entity.

There seemed to be something unusual about the company’s plans from the start since, at the time ProKidney announced it would be opening its nearly half-a-billion dollar facility in Greensboro and hiring hundreds of workers, ProKidney was an 80-person operation out of neighboring Winston-Salem.

The anticipated investment by ProKidney was going to bring about the same amount of investment as the investment by supersonic jet maker Boom Supersonic, yet there was surprisingly little hype surrounding the ProKidney announcement.

The new facility was going to play a role in the commercial manufacturing of Renal Autologous Cell Therapy, which would battle and, in some cases it was said, even reverse kidney disease.

A recent Yahoo Finance article questioned how long the company could keep up its current rate of “cash burn.”

“A company’s cash runway is the amount of time it would take to burn through its cash reserves at its current cash burn rate,” the article states. “When ProKidney last reported its December 2024 balance sheet in March 2025, it had zero debt and cash worth US$358m. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through US$156m. Therefore, from December 2024 it had 2.3 years of cash runway. That’s decent, giving the company a couple of years to develop its business.”

So, there may be hope for the company yet even though the stock is now a penny stock – which is officially any stock selling at under $5 a share.

 If ProKidney’s stock remains at under $1 a share it will be kicked off the Nasdaq exchange.

The stock price was over $13 a share on August 1, 2023, soon after the company closed on the purchase of a 210,000 square-foot building in Greensboro, where plans were to put a new facility to make “REACT” – ProKidney’s main product designed to battle kidney disease and even hopefully reverse it.

However, by late September of last year, the stock had fallen to under $5 a share, and, by January of 2025, it was at just over $1 a share.

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