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Can’t say he was a brilliant CEO at Silence, but he’s a canny trader. When at Silence he bought a position in Arrowhead Therapeutics and made many millions for his business by trading it a few months later. He’s a chess grandmaster and loves a strategic opportunity.
I agree that an episode of value / price discovery in the Reneuron stock price has now begun...
you could be right but who cares about the rampers? for genuine investors, it's just a case of waiting and topping up if they have any spare capacity whilst we stay below 3p.
i'm pretty sure the seller is a private wealth investor selling to crystallise a tax loss to off-set gains elsewhere in his portfolio. he's selling now because he wants to lock-in the loss ahead of year-end. if he waits a few more weeks, then he runs the risk of a brexit-rally of some kind. we had a large tax loss seller last year in March if you look at the chart... newsflow has been brilliant. you couldn't ask more of the new management. just have to be patient.
they're slightly ahead is my guess (no expert)....they generated positive data from a phase 1/2 trial in september/october in a sample of 15 patients. we only have a handful thus far...
Gene therapy is far trendier than our approach and nightstar are backed by syncona (wellcome trust) and other clever investors who are happy to talk it up.
Poor old Reneuron has no friends at all - apart from loyal Woodford - and everyone is trying to write him off (at their peril). Arguably, our approach is 'safer' from a regulatory perspective although the FDA is getting more relaxed on gene therapy. The main issue for gene therapy is pricing - it can be very high...GSK has had a product out for a couple of years now and the take-up has been very low because of cost. In theory, we could be cheaper and more mass market in pigmentosa - but I'd value a proper scientist's view on that assertion.
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Stem cell therapies have been out of fashion for a while now, as we know to our costs. i've gradually learned that science does follow fads and fashions. we are due our moment back in the sun, I suspect. perhaps a deal in pigmentosa will be the vehicle to do it.
I presume this explains some/all of the fuss today...
Another day, another gene therapy deal. The lure of the one-shot cure for rare eye diseases — a niche pocket within the broader arsenal of gene therapies — is en vogue, with Roche’s $4.3 billion buyout of Luxturna maker Spark Therapeutics $ONCE and J&J forking out up to $440 million to collect the rights to MeiraGTx’s slate of ophthalmological gene therapies this year. On Monday, Biogen joined the festivities with its agreement to acquire London’s Nightstar Therapeutics $NITE for roughly $800 million.
Biogen is willing to pay $25.50 in cash per Nightstar share — a premium of roughly 68% to Nightstar’s Friday close on the Nasdaq — to gain access to the UK company’s slate of rare retinal gene therapies designed for delivery via the use of a viral vector. The acquisition is expected to close by mid-year 2019, Biogen $BIIB said.
it's a decent question to ask. I think the answer is that the decision to buy requires some due diligence and some board-level time to sign-off on it. Nouryon is a big place, assessing hundreds of potential bolt-on deals a year. The capacity to prep a deal for board sign-off is limited, as is the costs and time to integrate the acquired business.
The one thing that isn't really a factor is the price to be paid. They're happy to pay hundreds of millions for an ITX in a few years time that is generating tens of millions of revenues and is fully operationally de-risked. But, at this current level, sales are too small for the board to bother spending time on...
one of the strongest arguments for investing in ITX - and others like it - is that the global household and personal care companies that ultimately buy their products, have been 'over-earning' for a large number of years. That means they've been underinvesting in product innovation and have been spending cash on dividends and buybacks instead. They were rewarded by the markets for doing so but no more.
These global players are now frantically scrabbling to buy-in sustainable innovation. See the comment below from german Nivea maker, Beiersdorf, made yesterday. ITX is a multi, multi-bagger - if you're patient.
“The consumer goods industry is undergoing a historical disruption. Our entire business model needs timely adaptation due to new market realities and fast-changing technology developments”, says Stefan De Loecker. “This requires first and foremost higher investments. We at Beiersdorf are motivated and prepared to kick-start this phase of transformation.”
You’re factually incorrect in the assertion that the recent investors get ‘free’ shares at 9.75p. They have a warrant over shares, which gives them the right but no obligation to buy another 9million at 9.75p (assuming the AGM passes the proposal). Please. Look up the definition of ‘warrant over ordinary shares’ in google.
No-one is discussing the monitoring business and the new product launch, in tandem with the new distribution arrangement in China, which guarantees a decent margin. Monitoring is already break even. It’s a really cool part of the business and carries the current modern water valuation on its own in my model.
Price action has been annoying but I’m still pretty relaxed in this name. I reckon its fair value here is 13p. It’s worth in the mid-20’s if there’s any sign of sustainable membrane contract wins. It’s probably worth another 10p on top of that if Gib comes thru...
Cash management has been excellent. We’ve got three decent shots on target via membrane, monitoring and gib. Nothing is certain, particularly on AIM, but have patience and give the management a bit more time to get it right in a very long cycle industry.
Good luck all.
yet another failure in an anti-fibrotic linked to NASH, etc. 'Good' news for us at the margin..... Patience....Patience...
France’s Inventiva (Euronext: $IVA) has suffered its first big setback following its public listing in 2017. The company’s lead experimental drug, lanifibranor, failed a mid-stage trial in patients with a form of systemic sclerosis (SSc) — a rare, chronic life-threatening disorder in which the immune system attacks its own organs and is characterized by a buildup of scar tissue — prompting the Daix-based drug developer to abandon the program for the indication.
The Phase IIb trial evaluated two doses of lanifibranor (800 mg, 1200 mg) against a placebo in 145 patients with diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis, which account for roughly 35% of the SSc population. Patients were given lanifibranor in either two doses of 400mg per day or two doses of 600mg per day over 48 weeks in addition to standard of care, which typically included immunosuppressive therapy.
Compared to the placebo, neither dose of the drug induced a statistically significant change in the modified Rodnan Skin Score — a scale measuring the evolution of skin fibrosis, which is correlated with internal scarring — missing the main goal of the study. None of the secondary endpoints, including changes in pulmonary function measured via forced vital capacity and overall progression of the disease, were met, Inventiva said on Monday.......
worth having a look at the Modern Water Twitter page, where they've posted a decent piece by local Gib TV on the project...It's the first chance I've had to actually look at the site/s under construction and to appreciate just how complicated the project is in terms of planning, etc. I didn't know they'd have to temporarily block off a tunnel during construction, for e.g.. Nor did I know that they have to transport regular amounts of dried poo etc. round to a landfill site in Spain....
I note a failure of a major phase 3 NASH trial at Gilead last night.... At the margin, this increases the interest and value of our fibrosis product, which is in the process of being licensed out by our Australian friends...NASH/fibrosis is such a massive, largely unmet area of need....
with that bid/ask spread of over 10% we will never really know what trade is what!
what does intrigue me is any sign of US interest in this name in afternoon trading over the next few months.
there are a lot of specialist medtech and bioscience funds over there and this is effectively a US-centric business nowadays - on a brexit-depressed UK multiple of sales. In addition, medtech companies are addicted to buying each other - it's always been a fertile hunting ground for M&A bankers trying to put together a deal.
agree completely. the issue this company has appears to be a nagging overhang of stock...decent newsflow won't translate into share price momentum if a seller pops up every time to collapse the bid. from an LTH perspective, that's frustrating but nothing more.
as you point out, if the growth rates off a larger sales base can continue at this kind of rate then the operational dog will eventually wag the share price tail and TRX will be valued efficiently at some point. Perhaps the other benefit of a low share price is that the management have to keep it lean and will also look for debt/bank financing to get them to b/e rather than dilute us via more equity. They only need a couple of million to get us to b/e if we keep at this rate - and no capital need at all if we were to accelerate from here.
yep. cash is fine. this business has been stripped right down to the bone and runs on a shoe-string by the US team....there's no need for a placing. the very clever, experienced guys with VC track-records who appeared on the register in the summer to save this company have no interest in diluting their positions with unnecessary cap raises. this company is going to show solid progression in the top line each time it reports and eventually investors will understand just how much of an annuity those revenues are going to be. once these guys get an order they will have it for decades. You can put a very high multiple on a business that can generate such resilient revenues.
It's going to be a cracker. It's Brexit-proof, it's a great story. Just buy it and sit on it!
Just to correct you, munch, they gave warrants not options and they were not for free but will cost 9.75p, exercisable within two years. They’d have to declare them nil cost if they were free.
So, a lot more bullish than your read. Happy to be corrected....
Am itching to add more and break my holding size limit....any buy with a 5 handle seems very astute to me...well done to those who managed to do so.
give me a shake when we get back over 90p....we're all so far underwater in this thing that an 8% move and a non-cash-relevant RNS doesn't move any of us.
If I were fresh money, I guess that would be a very encouraging sign of investor apathy at the trough....but I'm not.....
zzzzz
wonder if the selling is year-end related?....for some EIS/VCT funds and for those trying to lock-in tax-loss offsets there are good reasons to sell kit regardless of the underlying operational performance (and in this case we've got an air-pocket with no real contract news).
normally we do see some selling in innovation names in march, but with Brexit etc. some people may have been advised to sell now and get their trading book rather than risk illiquidity etc. nearer the end March deadline.
Yes, I'm trying a bit too hard to explain the sell pressure, I know...!
Fingers-crossed they're done now....We should have an RNS out at some point if the selling has come from one source - which feels likely.
Already today we've had more volume on any single day since Sept 17th. So it's a day when the register is tidying itself up....Something is a little odd, though. I would have hoped the recent equity raise would have allowed the register to be cleaned-up properly to allow the stock to react positively to any good news without being hit by sell tickets. I guess someone could have decided to sell since the equity raise - in disappointment at being diluted, perhaps? But that seems to make no sense as we all think that fair value is a lot higher than here. If someone has taken a view on the membrane business and declared it a dud - or they know of something negative associated with Gib, then they have new information and that seems unlikely - and illegal - too.
There was an intel miss last night to add to the news flow. We will start down but the key is everybody knows that h2 18 was poor and there has been inventory to work off. As I’ve said on this board in the past, IQE is a ‘super-cyclical’ and that means professional investors will be looking to buy it on the last earnings downgrade. This may well be it.
So, my prediction, for what it’s worth is we go down but there will be short covering and real buying to limit the move.
i'm underwater in this name and have held it for five years or so. it's been a frustrating journey and one that flirts with a risk of complete failure across all the business lines. But, what i do like about exposure to RENE is that its platforms give skin in the game in some real break-through technologies. There's nothing incremental here.
Stem cell is completely out of favour but if you follow RNAi at all you will know that it, too, was a technology that no-one wanted to touch after initial nobel prize excitement; now it's a niche worth 10s of billions in market cap. There's a lot of fad and fashion in science. Equally, Exosomes are genuinely exciting. They appear to be able to 'ghost' in and out of cells without causing stress/defensive response. As a means of delivery, they could be a game-changer. Lanxess and other global spec chemical companies are investing millions in them and that's really encouraging.
So, as long as our Reneuron positions are scaled accordingly and we can live with the potential loss and the boredom, I think it's more than fine to hold a few of these. Purp and others may well be right and it goes to nought but by now we should all know and accept that risk.
To finish: to get a Phase 2b trial in stroke launched in the US is a huge achievement for this UK management team when one thinks of FDA trial design approvals, local recruitment, etc. Management are operationally focused not investor focused and that can be frustrating. But given the long timelines and science complexity I think Olav and Michael are doing a great job. There, I've said it.
if you look at this in the context of the 'failure' of the open offer in October to raise anywhere near the 'upto £900,000' that management wanted, then this raise makes sense and could, perhaps, have been anticipated.
They must have ambitions to deploy capital to fund growth and after the failure of the open offer to provide that capital, they've gone to a specialist to help them. I think I find that reassuring. It just means that management are operationally focused and will do whatever it takes to get the resources they need to get the business on the move. I guess management's view is that 'we', the retail mob, had our chance to support them properly at the open offer and didn't take it.