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By trying to control the share price by persistently commenting on the valuation he is playing into the hands of traders and less likely to encourage investors (long term holders). Let the market decide CF.
Another piece today in the Wall Street Journal weighing up Challenger studies for vaccines.
Small quote from Cathal embedded in the article:
"A company in London called hVIVO that specializes in human challenge trials is “very actively looking into how we could build a Covid-19 challenge study to help speed up the world wide development of an effective vaccine,” said Cathal Friel, executive chairman of Open Orphan, a clinical trials company that acquired hVIVO earlier this year. He says at least 10 pharmaceutical companies have already expressed interest in them potentially conducting a challenge trial of their vaccine candidates."
https://fortunascorner.com/2020/05/11/one-idea-for-speeding-a-coronavirus-vaccine-deliberately-infecting-people/
I agree Sparkington and I see that self funding the Covid challenger will reap huge rewards.
Make me wonder if a big US Pharma might make an offer that can't be refused especially given the resources OO which pretty much hold worldwide exclusivity to pretty much anything involving virology testing
Thanks SportsTrader and Bazzman for reporting back.
Particularly like:
1. Imutex float on Nasdsaq rather than AIM. Pharmas generally higher valued by investors on American market
2. Withdrawal from agreement with Chinese for the Covid challenger study. Think this could put off many prospective clients requiring vaccine testing, and possibly prospective purchasers. I could see Orphan attracting considerable interest from big US/European Pharmas and they wouldn't want to jeopardise that! Actually surprised that this hasn't been RNS'd as the original agreement was on 9th March.
3) Really can't get a grip on why he thinks the market is getting ahead of itself. It's getting obvious that the company is worth at least £300m , 54p per share without the Imutex spin off
Cheers Guys.
Exciting times!!!
Hi Thomas,
Yes agreed about your valuation. This will spike once a Challenger Study is announced.
HVivo have 8 Challenger study models and there are only 2 other companies in the world, 1 in the US with 1 Challenger model and 1 in Belgium also with 1 model. These models take 5-6 years to develop.
Listen to Cathal in Feb this year (mentions about Challenge studies from around 7:30 mins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4u4pVCEAfY
Gunfish,
He actually states 2-3 times revenue. So it all depends how strongly the revenue grows over the next few months. A revenue stream of £100m(or more depending on the demand and that's likely to spike bearing in mind there are 100+ vaccines and there's a race on to get to market ASAP and Hvivo have somewhat of a monopoly) gives a market cap of £300m+ just for the services, equivalent to 54p per share.
Just for reference. The only other listed company that is testing a universal flu vaccine and has just started Phase 3 and they have a current Market Cap of $173.63 (£140m). As far as I am aware that is the only drug they are developing
https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/shares-search-results/b/biondvax-pharmaceuticals-ltd-adr
Brooko,
Possibly discussing remote Covid Challenger study? IMV don't think he will sell until he's maxed out the incoming pipeline revenue as a result of Covid.
Cheers
Dave
Spakington,
Totally agree. He'll never get a better opportunity as now.
Luck of the Irish and all that!
ATB
Dave
https://soundcloud.com/doc-h-4/6-5-20-interview-cathal-friel
Very positive interview. The 2-3 multiples revenue has always been Cathal's message from the early onset to investors. However if you listen later in the interview (and on other interviews too) he then starts to talk things up with mentions of the usage of the lab for testing adding 5-10 millions to the bottom line and in particular the "cream on the cake", the number of challenger studies for Covid vaccines, which could add "many multiples to the revenue" to quote CF (around10:30). The spinning off of Imutex to the Nasdaq/Aim and giving us 1 for 1 shares is handing over the lottery ticket to us investors which will realise greater value. I don't see this being sold imminently but it's the start of the bidding wars and the more revenue generated from Challenger studies secured, the higher will be the final selling price. If they can do £100m revenue then we could command £200-£300m for the Services plus our Imutex shares.
I reckon we are looking 6 months+ on personally as he mentions the summer for securing/conducting the challenger studies and probably be looking to sell later in the year.
All IMV
Very upbeat Podcast and the investor momentum is building nicely
Neil.
On Monday you said:
"Watch this fly today Boom time!"
Today your are saying it's going to be walked down to 8p
Are you for real or just trading.?
The latter I suspect
Dave
Cont'd...
A swifter turnaround for research requests was partly born of necessity, he said, but the organisation also found that embracing new technology made its processes more efficient. “All of these studies need the ethics of them to be looked at to give approval. You have to convene a group of experts and lay people together in one place.
“So traditionally a face-to-face meeting, perhaps a dozen people, sent the papers in advance. They print them and read them, they meet in London or Newcastle or Oxford and they discuss it and then they write back with their view. All of that is being compressed, everything is sent out electronically. Nobody has to travel anywhere; the meetings are being done by Zoom or other platforms. So we’re able to compress this to achieve this really fast turnaround time.”
He said that the number of requests that the HRA was being called on to approve had reduced “partly because patients aren’t coming into a hospital, and not being recruited”, but also because “many people in universities and scientists have turned their attention to Covid”.
Sir Terence said that the organisation’s Covid-19 experience might inform how it worked in the future, with a move to approving research in order of urgency, rather than its usual “cab rank” system of dealing with applications in the order they were received.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/volunteers-may-be-infected-to-test-coronavirus-drugs-55n8mf9v0
More calls for Challenger studies:
Deliberately infecting healthy volunteers will be the only way to test a coronavirus vaccine in Britain if the outbreak is brought under control, a research chief has said.
Sir Terence Stephenson, chairman of the Health Research Authority (HRA), said that its research ethics committees would consider any such proposal.
The HRA, which approves research undertaken on NHS patients in England, has approved 113 Covid-19 research trials on an accelerated schedule since the pandemic began. It usually considers requests for two months but has been able to give studies the go-ahead after as little as 24 hours.
They include a trial of the Oxford vaccine, based on a virus found in chimpanzees, which is seeking to establish whether it can prompt an immune response in healthy volunteers’ bodies without causing harm.
If a vaccine proves successful in such early trials, it will move forward to studies designed to test its effectiveness in stopping cases of the virus.
Sir Terence said that there were broadly three ways that such a trial might be run. “If we still have a lot of coronavirus infections happening in the UK, then the study could be done in the UK,” he said. “You give half the people the vaccine, half the people a placebo or a different vaccine, and you look and see if the group given the vaccine gets protected from infection.
“That would be the most standard, straightforward way, and no real ethical issue with that.”
Should the UK be in the position of “not having much coronavirus infection”, a second option would be studying it overseas, he said.
“The third possibility, and probably the most contentious, that would have to come to a research ethics committee, is the idea of giving some people the vaccine and then deliberately exposing them to the virus,” he said.
“Presumably, if you were to do that you would choose healthy young people with no other conditions, but it wouldn’t be without risk. It’s certainly not for me to give a judgment on whether that would be approved or not: giving ethics approval does not sit with the chairman. But my sense, having talked to people in the field and to some people on the research ethics committee, is that that is something they would have to look at very carefully.”
He added: “It is not a decision that has been made yet because it hasn’t come to us, but it is a decision that would be made by one of our research ethics committees.”
About 47,000 people have been recruited to 113 trials approved by the HRA. Other research that has received speedy approval, Sir Terence said, included trials of the antiviral remdesivir and the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus patients.
It's on the Directors Talk Interviews website
The URL has been changed by LSE
Substitute the asterisks with:
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No worries Jack. Not sure you heard one of the Podcasts but he mentioned several contracts were with lawyers but also on another Podcast with Directors Talk on 24th April he is quoted saying ‘Expect some quite substantial contracts’
The thing is there's not many other companies that can compete with hVivo's offering
https://www.***************************/open-orphan-expect-some-quite-substantial-contracts-interview/412815452
ATB
Dave
Sportstrader,
Good question and not sure of any limitations of hVivo running any number of worldwide remotely Human Challenge studies.
Not sure of the exact logistics involved with staff etc but in this recent interview done to a Chinese audience, Cathal seems to offer the remote service globally (about 12:06 minutes in):
" HVivo from our London office can remotely run a Human Challenge study tomorrow in China and our view is we want to make our services available all over the world"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P21snVLiA3Q
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* website