The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
I think this a wonderful company. Their Arestat technology allows them to make stable liquid formulations of proteins, peptides and even virus vaccines. They can replace cryogenic & cold chain and powder formulations with liquid formulations which usually don't need any refrigeration, mixing etc. Commercially they have a combination of licensed projects and their own (blockbuster) insulin products. Their technology enables them to have the fastest acting insulin and the most concentrated insulin in the world.
My understanding about Continuum is that Continuum owns all the IP that comes out of that research programme. (I would love to be corrected on this). Of course anyone who knows about the IP may then do a deal that is beneficial to all to commercialise it.e.g by combining IP and knowhow etc.
The Baseimmune software does something a bit different. It looks at all known variants of a particular bacteria or virus and how they evolved. It also takes information about structural data and which bits are externally visible. Throws all of these into one pot and identifies the most unvarying, immunogenic bits of the virus and then stitches them together into one antigen package. Baseimmune don't care about how it will be delivered viral vector, mRNA, protein, DNA etc - that's not their area of interest. It's interesting technology - I cant see how it would be applicable to cancer, but is certainly applicable to many diseases. The competition to Scancell would emerge if one of the existing players were to team up with them and say this is what we'll deliver with our now very widely proven platform. There also a company in Cambridge doing roughly the same thing. Otherwise I'd say that so far the N protein has not shown to change much but there is some evidence that it is not so immunogenic so the immunogenic nature of Scancell's vaccine would really make a big difference.
Ruck, You are right. The lower the infection rate the lower the chance of mutation. The chance of mutated infection spreading will be higher where there are many people who have no immunity (neither infection nor vaccine) or very narrow immunity(single spike protein vaccination). While we are locked down the rate of spread will be lower, but not the potential final spread, unless we manage to quarantine the mutants out of existence. What would be useful would a vaccine which provides an invariant immunogenic portion of the virus...
American insurance not so simple. American insurance companies have a limit on how much profit they can make. Its a % of medical spend, so perversely, they're all for high costs....
Thanks very much for sharing the documents!
I think that Scancell's Covidity is the way to go, but I'd caution against taking the failure of PCR tests as the evidence for that statement. (there are many other excellent reasons)
The PCR tests are not based on many bits of the spike and the change of a single base should lead to a PCR failure but should not lead to the failure of a vaccine which will have produced very many antibodies attacking and blocking very many different sites on the spike. I preferred the focus on the very long lasting T-Cell response to the N protein previously highlighted by others as the reason.
I hope I wont be proved wrong when they do cross reactivity testing in the blue boxes of figures 8. (as it would be bad for all of us)
Before the news of the 55 year age limit, my guess had been that the performance increase of the half dose full dose was due to the higher first dose producing an immune reaction against the Chimp Adeno virus component. The immune reaction may have taken out the viruses of the second dose before they were able to produce the relevant antigen in the patient's cells. But it's only a guess!
A very good, if long, article about the immune system and Covid from The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-coronavirus-hacks-the-immune-system
Makes mention of a certain trial using Interferon B which gave a 79% reduction in serious illness in Covid patients, but doesnt go as far as mentioning SNG.
hi Crumbs,
I really hope they don't go down a CAR-T route. CAR-t has loads of problems. (manufacturing, transportation, lymphodepletion, cost, crowded). SCIB has done a great job. If the electroporation free approach works as well or better, they should stick to those guns (as well as the Moditope and Avidimab) and stay well away from the crowded and doubtful CAR-T world.
Hi Botski, yes, I am. I think it's great that they have a war chest , but worried that if Scancell do well, Redmile will buy out at an attractive price but short of real value. Then again I often hold on to shares for too long so if (at some future fantasized big exit) I am forced to sell that might not be a bad thing.
Ruckrover,
They are a cucktail of neutralizing antibodies. I believe it's a cucktail of just two but I may be wrong. A neutralising antibody is one which stops a virus from infecting a cell. Usually it is an antibody that latches onto the docking portion of a virus - or the spike in this case.
If it is given to a person with an infection (and it all works as intended), the antibodies will lock onto free floating virus. The dendritic cells will then chew up the antibody and virus combo and present them back to the immune system.
The immune system then goes on to raise an immune response which may involve T cells and antibodies. These new antibodies will likely be different to the ones in the cucktail.
So it's a combination of blocking the virus if you have it and help raise an immune response - again if you have it. If you don't have the virus it wont do a thing. (except give you a hole in the arm and possibly minor side effects).
COVIDITY would cost less and be more stable to ship and can be given and should if you don't have the virus. If you do have the virus the cucktail would likely start to more quickly than COVIDITY.
Do I really have to change C***tail in order to avoid filters?
If you are considering fasting another option (if it suits) is just eating during a small time window each day - for example 8 hours ideally well away from sleeping time. e.g. Breakfast after 10, last meal before 6 pm. (Brunch and Sunday lunch combo) This ensures your fat burning enzymes get to have a go everyday.
Bermudashorts,
True.
I love it when a proper discussion arises, as it allows good information to be shared.
The potential for less than 100% synergy (defined as 1+1>2) is that there can be other checkpoints that are preventing a full action of the immune system.
However I believe a study showed that when blocking the activity of PD1, the tumor switched to increase production of PD-1 (downregulating the production of other checkpoints in the process - after all there is only so much production it can do), so that show stopper may be less of a problem than one (me before Lindy explained the effect*) might have expected.
*all misinterpretations entirely mine!
So I think, few reasons for the effect to be less than a sum of the two and some scope for it to be more.
Obviously if there is no PD1 at all or the wrong HLA then no benefit, but of course these are things that would be checked.
https://www.darkdaily.com/german-scientists-train-dogs-to-detect-the-presence-of-covid-19-in-saliva-samples-can-a-canines-nose-be-as-accurate-as-clinical-laboratory-testing/
Send a dog with a SNG 001 Nebuliser around its neck instead of the barrel of cognac. If the dog thinks you have it, you take a puff!*
*This is not an approved clinical procedure.
How big you make your trial is not something a company has exclusive decision on.
Ethics boards come into it. You have to justify the size of the trial.
Because you are potentially putting patients at risk the trial has to be roughly the right size to give you a p of <0.05 in 80% of the cases that you run the trial, based on what you expect the results to be. If you ask to have many more patients the regulator will say no. You can do that in the next stage of trial.
Hi Manifesto, I don't mean manufacture of the drug for clinical trials, I meant production of drug for all the people who will get treated in the second wave. 800,000 people have died. Do we think we're half way there yet? Lets say the second wave is the same size as everything so far. 6% of people died in the placebo arm, so divide the number of people who have died by 6%, that's 12.8m people (a rough indication of the number you'd treat with SNG.) Do you really think you'll be able to manufacture 12.8 million doses of a new formulation for £4m? (that's ignoring the possibility that it might be an early intervention drug and so suited to many more people). It's brilliant that Venrock is in. They may be happy to flip it, license it out, but they may be a lot happier putting in a slug more money and doing it properly as they have in all the other companies mentioned. If the full trial results are in line with the first bit of the trial, it will take off, but to do it justice it'll need more money. If you try to do it slowly, vaccine will catch up and a whole bunch of people will suffer needlessly.
Hi RichList,
To start off with, I'd reiterate Ghia's excellent point about formulation which will give time in which SNG can have a monopoly without having to have recourse to patents, by being the only people who have a ready to go formulation. Secondly I'd say that with that in mind manufacturing capability will be the next important thing and I am sure SNG are doing everything they can to make plans for that to happen quickly. If I were them I would raise enough money to ensure a production capability to make use of the opportunity they have created. It will only be a fraction the size requirement of the vaccine but still significant. Not a lot of patents left in PPE but people manufacturing and selling them are doing very well thank you!
On the patents, there is a rule that you can't just get a patent to apply a new material to an old problem. If Bob invents a new lighter metal, I can't get a patent on "wheels made out of the new lighter stronger metal". Similarly, unless you can make a case that COVID is unlike anything before it will be difficult to get a specific patent for the use of an existing drug to a new disease that you would reasonably expect it to work for. Although Covid is quite unusual - it is still a Corona virus that is known to do something to the lungs and so for the person skilled in the art SNG's INF-B is an obvious choice. Luckily for SNG a large proportion of people who get Covid fall under the Influenza like illness definition and so only SNG's material can be used. It may be that SNG has managed to think of another way of defining Covid-19 and can squeeze another selection patent out of it, but they probably wont have filed anything until 20th of July and we wont know for another 12 months whether they have filed anything and 18 months until we know what they've filed - and then 3 years before we'll get an idea of what might be granted. During that period SNG should make hay and save lots of people's lives. They will have benefited (hopefully ) from accelerated approvals and the same identical product is then likely to save many people who have lung focused influenza.