Member Info for Awonda

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.

@johnht thanks for sharing the clinicaltrials.gov comparison showing how it has gone pivotal. That is fantastic news (and very interesting).

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.

Sirs,
I plead naivety/ignorance, (but I knew I had the second and it turns out I had the first for trying to have a conversation. ) and wish you all very well.

That it takes quite a while (6-18 months if at all successful) to get a good formulation is true and I think that would be reason enough (whether the formulation is patented or not) for someone to want to buy it out.
No-one else will be ready in time to make an InfB for the next wave. If they manage to get accelerated approval (as they should) they should be able to do very well in the next few years.

Hi Ghia,
You might be right and that would be wonderful , but I think they would be in for a massive fight (with patent offices) on the basis that the inventive step to thinking that interferon B which has been shown to be really good for fighting lung based viral disease , might be good for fighting a different lung based viral disease is quite small.

I don't think there would be opposition from other companies as I cant see a benefit for other companies as they wouldn't be able to get any useful patents either.
I think the patent protection they already have would be enough to justify easily £300m of valuation, but I don't think it gives them exclusive for all uses of interferon B with COVID.

No DtD, the patent gives SNG the right to claim for patent infringement against a product that does all of the things stated in claim 1.
I'll be clear:
If a patient turns up less than 48 hours after he develops and measures a fever, anyone can give him nebulised interferon and SNG wont have a leg to stand on.
Come 48 hours, providing he's also got a cough and a headache (or at least two out of the 4 flu symptoms) SNG can step in and make a fuss.

If you sell a covid test and interferon combo kit which states you should only use the IB on people you have freshly diagnosed, happy days. (providing of course you're able to pay for all the clinical trials get the evidence etc. etc.)

Hi Davethedumplin, no, I'm an early stage VC so my job does include looking at patents (a lot). However, I've never seen one with a claim 1 with that kind of structure, so I think its very interesting and I'm digging around in the various patent communications to figure out how they got there. It's clear they didnt have Covid-19 in mind when they wrote the patent, but intention doesnt really matter.

Manifesto, I'm not paid to be a deramper, but I take it as a compliment providing you'll also consider me a decrasher. Analysis is a good thing, the other way there are naked emperors and the more relevant, Trumpism that "if we test less fewer people will die". I would apologise to people who have been through all the details of patent discussion before and find it boring but in the 33,000 posts on this board that separate today from the mid-April pointers to the patents (SGD17 doing a great job back then too thanks), there are many more boring posts about evil MMs distorting the market than discussion of sales margin, business model, potential purchasers or even the benefit to mankind that SNG will bring.

The link that disappeared from my last message was from the Guardian entitled. "Coronavirus symptoms fall into six different groupings, study finds"

Thanks for the pointer to the April discussions ... I'll search out of interest.

Thanks Dibs61 I was doing my own research and using the kind and expert people on this board to help - I was aware that I might get it in the neck from people worried I might be trying to crash the stock by asking questions. (or trying to ramp it)
My view (I work with many companies that do clinical trials and am comfortable with statistics) on the whether it works is that that's fine. Of course it could still go wrong down the line and this could be a 1 in 20 , but the likelihood of it being less good than dexamethasone (the best other thing so far) is very small and with their mode of action being so different it would rarely be an "either or" that's going to limit sales of Synairgen. I also think that it will highlight the potential of the benefit of SNG001 for influenza which also kills lots of people and is around every year. And for that the patents really do seem rock solid. Everyone who gets the flu has a headache and a sore body.

However (and I am teasing a bit here ) The patent says you have to have a fever AND two of the symptoms: headache, cough, sore throat and myalgia to be covered. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/17/covid-19-symptoms-falls-into-six-different-groupings-study-finds-coronavirus . This link has a nice analysis of how symptoms breakdown for patients. Certainly the last group would all fall under the patent guidelines and be the one that is most in need of treatment, but sore throat and headache are relatively rare in covid....

Thanks

Sorry, I am genuinely trying to understand the situation, I am not trying to play anyone. I'll search the board to see what's been said in the past.
I'm not to my knowledge an MF crew ... not sure what one of those is.
SGD27 thank you very much for guiding me to that patent family.

There is a claim for nebuliser delivery but it's a dependent claim i.e. only for people with Asthma COPD.

A competitor would have to make sure that its product was clearly labelled, "not for Asthma or COPD patients". That would allow them to avoid this patent.
There are general usage nebulisers - I dont know if the accuracy of dose is very important with the interferon B and whether Synairgen's technology is different and able to more accurately dose it.
Their website doesn't really make any mention of special delivery capability.