RE: Yawn22 Dec 2020 17:52
Think its not a question of confidence in being offered a licensing deal and more a question of being offered a fair deal.
Without this loan offer from Mint Hemogenyx did not have a lot of cash, they did not have enough to fund IND applications or clinical research, they would have needed cash from somewhere be it licencing a product or a placing etc.
PRE-Mint they really were at the mercy of Eli who could have used attrition to delay and low ball knowing Hemo had no alternatives. With the loan that is off the table, Hemo can go with no deal and proceed at pace with CDX.
That said I dont for one second believe that they wont come to an amicable agreement, if they were unlikely to licence they would have walked and kicked Hemo out of their labs long ago. It also opens the door to someone like Pfizer or J&J poaching CDX under their noses after Eli did most of the work... not going to happen.
There is also the fact that the loan was probably months in the making, August or September is my guess, at that time Eli labs were shut to all but Covid, Vlad probably got fed up waiting and started looking for funding for everything then rather than wait for Eli to reopen and make an offer which may then have been a rubbish offer with tiny up front cash after wasting months waiting.
As for the first tranche of the loan, the sooner the better, as soon as they have cash they can file for IND applications straight away and clinical trials can start a very short time later. But please dont get your hopes up, apparently getting a prospectus approved can take quite a while, it has to be approved by the FCA and there can be alot of back and forth, I have been quoted timescales approx 5-6 weeks. After this another week or so to arrange with Mint for the draw down, so honestly whilst it could be late January I realistically dont expect it before February or March, but happy to be wrong and see it sooner.
The only good thing about the waiting for the loan is that there is an excellent chance of the Eli Lilly agreement before the loan gets drawn, if that happens the SP will rocket and any CLNs issued will be at a much inflated SP from today so when Vlad finally decides to sell the company we will all get a bigger share of the pie.