The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring financial educator and author Jared Dillian has been released. Listen here.
I am 99% sure that PNT2004 is the first clinical candidate to come from the CanSEEK/TME-targeting platform. In the presentation, the CEO clearly states that it uses the tech licensed from Tufts. It targets FAP-alpha.
I think the TME is listed as a separate project in the business update just to denote that it is a platform, with other drug candidates expected to emerge from it in time.
Gmcc, good to challenge to make sure. I just went back to check again, and at c.10min on slide 16 in this investor presentation, in the small print it says:
“Point’s CanSEEK(TM) has been sub-licensed from both Bach Biosciences and Avacta Life Sciences, who has branded the technology as Pre|Cision(TM) (an Avacta trademark).
So in this case, it very much “is us”!
Maybe the CanSEEK application has a subtly different chemistry, eg one that doesn’t involve cleavage of the substrate in the presence of FAPa, and therefore Billy P reckoned he could license it separately?
I’m thinking with a radioligand you only need to get the radioisotopes to stick around near the tumour, and they can do that whether they stay bound or cleaved.
Anyone with more biochem knowledge than I have want to weigh in?
Is it us?
(2/2)
This assumption stated, my notes on the 13 Sep investor presentation:
- Pipeline discussed from c.09:40, PNT2004 from c.12:00
- Point are very well funded, with $274m in the bank as of June 2021, and have their own vertically integrated radioligand manufacturing facilities.
- Despite having two drugs at Phase 3, the CEO sounded most excited about the commercial opportunity for PNT2004, which he described as having a “pan-cancer” application, as opposed to their Phase 3 drugs which are targeted at specific indications.
- Licensed FAPa targeting technology described as “best-in-class”
- PNT2004 pre-clinical studies had extremely encouraging results, with 100% survival rates at 80 days.
- As a result they are ramping up activity to get it to clinic, with IND expected Q1 2022, and entering Phase I clinical trials targeted in 2022.
- One other drug on the CanSEEK platform is in the pipeline already.
Thoughts:
- They are seriously excited about their “CanSEEK platform”, which as I’ve said I take to be the one sub-licensed from Avacta, and they are gunning to trial it and commercialise it as quickly as possible.
- Their cash pile and manufacturing capability make it sound like they have a chance to launch the drugs directly rather than sub-license, which I think is good for Avacta’s potential cut.
- The first drug on the platform has milestone payments up to $9.5m to Avacta, and each additional drug on the platform that goes to development will lead to up to $8m in milestone payments to Avacta, plus royalties on anything commercialised.
- They are now a competitor in the FAPa-targeting space, who share the best technology with us, but at least if they succeed, we stand to gain a revenue stream from the royalties!
(1/2)
With thanks to gmcc for posting the link on Monday, just got round to watching this Point investor presentation. Very interesting! Only 16mins of your time.
https://journey.ct.events/view/f6338e19-ea31-468f-bace-6c6fe219f8eb
My understanding (different from gmcc) is that PNT2004, the FAP-alpha targeting radioligand, uses the PreCision technology licensed from Avacta. They only mention licensing it from Tufts university, rather than from Avacta, but it’s clearly the same technology. I think that it just sounds better for their US investor audience to link it back to the prestigious university, rather than a little-known company on AIM.
Point’s press release on the licensing of the platform as “Can-SEEK” is dated from 10 Nov 2020:
https://www.pointbiopharma.com/press-releases/announcing-licensing-and-partnership-for-canseek-tm-pan-cancer-targeting-technology
The Avacta press release on the partnership is dated 7 January 2021:
https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/AVCT/license-agreement-with-point-biopharma-inc-4ltd3yd383pyl32.html
Point did not announce the partnership with Avacta separately, so I presume these are related announcements. Perhaps William Pachovchin at Tufts did a cheeky deal with a rebranded version of PreCision, then Avacta’s lawyers got involved and arranged their cut? Or perhaps it was all amicably arranged, and the commercials just took an extra 2 months to hammer out. Either way, I would be immensely surprised if CanSeek is not the PreCision platform sublicensed from Avacta.
Oh, good to know, thanks for clarifying. I think you confused PAH00 as well!
Timster, I don’t use any other usernames on this site. Like me or not, your accusation is completely false. Have a good evening.
Oh dear. If I’m just making myself an “unlikeable twat”, I’m probably wasting time and posting too much waffle-b******ks. For the record, nothing I’ve said was intended maliciously at you, Timster.
Yeah… Market cap?
A punchy $900m according to themselves:
http://stage.investorroom.com/tyrabio/stock-information
We’ve been there. We’ll be back there with the right results…
Wyn, if treatments improve, there will still be a need for triage tests to diagnose covid and put the patient onto the appropriate treatment pathway. In hospitals this does tend to be PCR, but for any future at-home treatments, or for vulnerable patients’ peace of mind, LFTs may have a role.
There will always be those who refuse the vaccine (probably more of a priority than improving the efficacy is increasing uptake), and a risk the NHS is overwhelmed every winter, not to mention a risk that workplaces suffer downtime due to an outbreak, and we each suffer a risk of infecting vulnerable people we love. So I think there will be a market for those who want to use LFTs to check any respiratory disease isn’t covid before going out/ to work/ to visit vulnerable relatives.
And as long as there are countries like NZ and China trying to stop covid from taking hold, or new more threatening variants circulating, there will be a need for tests in the travel industry. They will be forced to err on the side of caution. An LFT (or a few) for all international travellers will actually be significantly less faff (and expense) than the current system. I can see it being an intermediate step for a few years at the very least, and a requirement for several decades at best.
But we’ll see! There’s a danger in being too UK-centric in our views, and it’s important to note that even though we need to just live with this virus in the long term, it is novel and worse than flu, so the measures taken to live with it are likely to be different and more intrusive.
I love a bit of reasoned challenge but have got no time for cynical needling or all the personal attacks. I actually agree with ndn that supplying the UK govt or its departments directly is now an increasingly distant possibility. I can imagine sales to selected niches within the NHS eventually - with more people making more individual purchasing decisions, then there are likely to be some honest, informed buyers who choose AffiDx.
But the main thrust of the thesis for realising major value from the LFT is HUA and DTC sales via Medusa. We know that Avacta and Medusa are working very closely together on this, and we have been told we won’t get week-to-week updates, so likely we won’t hear anything until it’s done. Rumours tells us it could be this month - seems feasible. AS has told us only that it would need to be by year-end, which was an uncharacteristically distant estimate for him, so maybe one with built-in slack for once?
And to everyone saying this is high risk… What is your understanding of “high risk”? Can you quantify that? I know that it’s easier to shoot down an estimate than put numbers out there in the first place, but here we go anyway with my mental picture:
- Odds of mass LFT sales to UK gov this pandemic? <10%
- Odds of Calibre sales of pro-use test eventually growing to >2m/month (roughly estimated group break-even)? 60%
- Odds of completing HUA and growing to meaningful (say >5m/month, possibly far higher) sales via Medusa? 70%
- Odds of positive data from AVA6k Phase 1A (dose escalation, Pharmaco-kinetics) giving encouragement and enabling procedure to Phase IB (dose expansion)? >90%
I think these are the key things in the forefront of investors’ minds, and I’m happy to be disavowed of my misconceptions if anyone disagrees. But we can also go on:
- Odds of LG Chem collaboration progressing to clinic (Independent of AVA6k success)?
- Odds of Daewoong JV collaboration success?
- Odds of Point collaboration success?
- Odds of TMAC progressing to clinic (tied to AVA6k success)?
- Odds of successfully launching future AffiDx diagnostic LFTs?
- Odds of significant royalty streams via Astraea/Biokit/Bruker (BAMS)/ etc?
- Odds of further licensing deals?
Etc etc.
I’d argue that individual opportunities within the portfolio might be high risk, but with the validated Affimer platform, and the hopefully soon-to-be validated PreCision platform, I’d argue that the risk is mitigated to a large extent from a portfolio point of view.
The shared risk across the whole portfolio of course is execution. It would be good to see the diagnostics leadership team deliver something commercially, but I would argue the therapeutics team IS delivering with AVA6k having successfully gone to clinic roughly on time. But this Avct-specific execution risk (if you believe it is an issue) is mitigated in the non-operated collaborations, of which there many.
Taken as a whole, is it really “high risk” in the long term?
All sounds entirely sensible to me, good summary!
One thing to add on the current sales of professional-use only LFTs. People forget that Avacta had <£10m in the diagnostics division kitty to work with at the point of CE marking. You can’t immediately make huge batches without breaking the bank and/or taking a risk. Even a few months of relatively small sales will have produced a greater cash float that can be fronted to produce ever bigger batches.
AS has recently said when stating manufacturing capacity, “X million per month ‘available to us’ “. This doesn’t mean they’re going to call on it all at once. It just means we have headspace available to scale into, and they have worked to make sure it’s not the bottleneck.
With lots of manufacturing capacity available, and drawing on a growing fraction of it, at any time you’re only going to use the supplier(s) with cheapest cost of goods. So I’m less worried about TT to new suppliers if we’re not maxing out the current cheapest option already.
In simpler terms (perhaps?), the mathematical point often missed in amateur models of exponential growth is that the rate slows as the impact of a ‘ceiling’ is felt - in this case susceptible population size. Vaccinations basically lower that ceiling for growth rates in hospitalisations and deaths - and cases, to a lesser extent.
The numbers are all true and factual. However, the implied hope from what O&W wrote (quite undiplomatically I might add!) is that with mass vaccinations reducing most adults’ odds of hospitalisation and death if they do catch covid, then as cases grow exponentially, the crest of the wave - the worst-case scenario - won’t be as bad this time.
i.e. if everyone in the UK were to catch covid today, there would be something like <10% of the hospitalisation requirement vs if everyone had caught it a year ago, pre-vaccinations.
There is also the hope that vaccinations will reduce the rate of growth of new cases, which at first glance seems to be borne out by the rate of change of new cases now vs one year ago, and vs when the case rate was this high in December. Winter will still be worse than now though, with people spending more time indoors in less-ventilated settings, so I’m sure we’ll see some additional measures.
However, it seems the government’s hope is to expose everyone, and only introduce additional measures to reduce the rate of spread if the hospital system is on course to be overwhelmed. I kind of sympathise with this, tbf. The virus is now endemic. We will not eliminate it with existing technology in our lifetimes. So we have to eventually live with it, and balance protecting the vulnerable and the NHS with getting on with our lives. There are still a few years’ huge market for the LFT in travel, population screening, and certain other settings, I am sure.
If you are talking of a “fair price”, or fair value, please do show your working. Others (Trinity, Myles McNulty) have presented extensive and conservative sum of parts analyses and end up closer to £3.
There is space on the device for a QR code to be printed.
It isn’t needed at the moment.
It’s cheaper to produce without.
MrA, appreciate challenge, but at the link you provided Avacta describe Amrik Basran as “Avacta’s CSO” and reproduce an article in which he’s referred to as “Dr Amrik Basran, Chief Scientific Officer at Avacta”. This proves my point.
Or maybe:
- They are clearly subdividing comms so people stop asking “what about the LFT?” on all the Therapeutics comms?
- As others speculate, lots of news is upcoming to be announced through this new Diagnostics channel.
Or some combination of the above - who knows? It’s just very noticeable at the moment that everything being done or announced lately is either under the auspices of Therapeutics or Diagnostics, as opposed to Group.
It could still be an inverse head and shoulders. I did look yesterday and wonder if Ophidian had called the closure of this pattern prematurely. Too soon to say he’s wrong about it though. We’ll know when we move decisively out of the c.120-140 range of the opposite shoulder. I know which way I think it’s going when this happens!