The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
You suggest "Angle are currently targeting the Companies in the World that carry out CANCER RESEARCH as this in itself is a massive market potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars! "
That's a wild exageration, on a par with AN!
Do you have any idea of the number of people undergoing clinical trials for cancer. Even if you were to assume four samples filtrated per person per trial you are talking insufficient revenues to make Angle viable. What did you think Angle would be charging the researchers per filtration?
If you insist on "rampant" exageration do not sign off IMHO - there's nothing "Humble" about your opinions
Angle Plc - Sept 2022 Quote:
"Together with MidLantic Urology, ANGLE will initiate clinical studies aimed at investigating the use of the Parsortix® system for the detection of prostate cancer ….. The design of the first study to be conducted with MidLantic Urology, expected to be initiated in Q3 2022, ….. Blood samples collected by MidLantic Urology will be shipped to ANGLE's United States clinical laboratory for processing by the Parsortix system to harvest and analyse CTCs and associated immune cells. "
"ANGLE expects headline results from the first study of 100 men in 2023."
"The Solaris Health network encompasses more than 500 clinical urology providers across 179 locations and nine States with more than 729,000 unique patients annually."
I would consider this to be quite an important potential route to what is a very large market.
So why have we received no update from Angle, we were informed to expect headline results in 2023!
I did some digging myself and drew a blank.
The American Urological Association (AUA) does not mention it nor liquid biopsy in its annual resume (https://www.urotoday.com/conference-highlights/aua-2023/aua-2023-prostate-cancer/144046-aua-2023-updates-on-clinical-trials-in-prostate-cancer.html) and MidLantic (https://midlanticurology.com/clinical-research/) make no mention of it either!
The following paper takes a wide-angle look at the potential and challenges for liquid biopsy – the key take-away:
Liquid biopsy: from concept to clinical application (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48501-x)
“More interventional clinical trials are urgently needed to widely implement liquid biopsy in clinical practice......... Of particular significance, the multi-center standardization of pre-analytical and analytical methods is imperative before liquid biopsy can be consistently used in clinical settings. …….. the European Liquid Biopsy Society in the EU, or the BLOODPAC in the U.S.A. continue to lead significant programs to complete this mission and develop and validate a wide range of standard operating procedures”.
Conclusion: (i) Angle treats its shareholders like muppets, (ii) if the jam ever arrives it will only do so many years hence which means you'll need a lot more cash to keep this horse in the race.
Since July 2018 the installed base has risen from 200 to 290 units by June 2023, that is an average of 18 each year.
Over this 5 year period product revenues were £3.5m so of 39k per unit (a maximum as it assumes none of the product revenues relate to the 200 unit installed base at the start of the period).
In 2022, 270 installed units generated unit service revenue of £1700, a minimum as we can assume that not all of the units were in full use.
None of these observations gives confidence that Angle will reach £6m revenues this year and more importantly that a cash raise in 2024 can be deferred.
On the other hand, HER2 screening is growing in importance and being a screening procedure, woud include more than ~70% of all patients. If the Parsortix filtration for HER2 analysis became the recommended medical procedure then we've crossed the finishing line.
However, it takes 2-4 years for a viable, proven procedure to become recommended best practice.
The race continues.
As I see it, I am a speculator in Angle, I own 4'000 shares because I limit my speculative bets (mostly).
At present there are insufficient grounds for "investing", again as I see it.
Apart from a FDA / EU approved product that clearly works, there is little else to underwrite an investment decision.
The 200+ units in full (or partial) use by research organisations do not support a business case. At least none has been put forward by the company.
So, all one has to go on are the product milestones, clinical study results, the signing of initial "Trial" clients, and prospective events. It is akin to betting on the horse one fence at a time as it navigates the racecourse. There has been progress and many of you have banked handsome gains / losses as each fence has been cleared whereupon the uncertainty of the next fence comes into view, and so on. Also the jockey Newland / Nero has come in for a lot of critism for his poor horsemanship making the next fence all the more uncertain.
As yet, we have no business case to go on.
Having a product and knowing the size of the market and the turnover of your "trial" clients does not constitute a business case. This explains why Newland is stringing (would be) investors along, he needs a lot more time to build a business case. We were encouraged to believe there may be one for using Parsortix to monitor the progress of breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.
Investors, be they us, an institution or an entity looking to acquire Angle need to a business case to put a value on the company. The recent price gyrations (160p down to 10p) just confirms that nobody can estimate the value of the company presently. At the current market cap Abbott Laboratories, Qiagen, Illumina, or any of the big boys could buy Angle out of petty cash - so why don't they?
So to return to my analogy - Angle is just a horse with a one legged jockey and nobody knows where the finishing line is but that doesn't stop us from betting on each and every upcoming fence, or speculating on the potential stud fees if we win the grand national some day!
So all the pumpers and dumpers, the dreamers and the naysayers, on-lookers and comentators on this board are perfectly rational when they post their remarks - it is just a punt on the next fence, some wish to raise our confidence ther wish to lower it and other still are hoping to eventually find out what race we are in and if we have back the right horse for said race.
Now I did some digging into breast cancer in the U.S. (links below)
In a nutshell, it appears to me that when you consider the number of patients receiving chemotherapy (excl. adjunct chemotherapy), the main cohort being those with stage III / IV cancers, the addressable market for Parsortix is too small to build a viable business case.
Just a recap from the prior post....
Parsortix is a diagnostic device which CANNOT be used for diagnosis !
Taken from Angle's website:
Parsortix®PC1 system
The Parsortix®PC1 system is cleared by the FDA only when used with the MBC-01 Metastatic Breast Cancer Kit and ICT-01 Instrument Control Test kit in compliance with the approved instructions for use.
Product Intended use:
The Parsortix PC1 system is an in vitro diagnostic device intended to enrich circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood collected in K2EDTA tubes from patients diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The system employs a microfluidic chamber (a Parsortix cell separation cassette) to capture cells of a certain size and deformability from the population of cells present in blood. The cells retained in the cassette are harvested by the Parsortix PC1 system for use in subsequent downstream assays. The end user is responsible for the validation of any downstream assay.
The standalone device, as indicated, does not identify, enumerate or characterize CTCs and cannot be used to make any diagnostic/prognostic claims for CTCs, including monitoring indications or as an aid in any disease management and/or treatment decisions.
Ok, so if I read correctly...Parsortix cannot be used as an aid in any desease management and/or treatment decisions.
So, apart from research use cases (which will never prove commercially viable IMO), what exactly can it be used for ?
Gentlemen,
I seem to remember way back in 2020/21 that someone posted a link to a Angle financial forecast made by Jeffries.
Anyone aware of the post and capable of reviving the link..... please.
I was fortunate in my timing and made £3030 on Angle when it obtained FDA approval. I held onto 3'000 shares and have lost all my gains as the price collapsed from 160p to today's 10p or less. So, I've been stung like most investors here.
I did my research on liquid biopsy and the great potential it represented and so when I took a stake in Angle I assumed that we were targeting an FDA decision to approve Parsortix for cancer screening - a large and lucrative addressable market. It was only a weeks after the FDA approval and sitting on a nice profit that I read the FDA details to find that Parsortix is NOT approved as a screening device, merely a filtration device and then only for breast cancer samples.
Some of you gents may have a clearer view of how A.N was positioning the product in the run up to the FDA approval (i.e as a filtration unit or as a screening unit - for all cancers or for breast cancer alone). In any case, A.N was intentionally misleading when he referred to the market potential of Parsortix following the FDA approval. The last two years have proven such. Not a single medical authority or medical services business has purchased a Parsortix unit and put it into daily operation. Imagine A.N forecasting that two years ago!
I fear Angle will be over taken by developments of the leaders in liquid biopsy such that the Parsortix "use case" will lose commercial value.
As regards the back and forth between my colleagues on this board re what the realistic prospects are for Angle, it is worth pointing out to the optimists amoung you that we have had lots of baloons floated along the way only to be pricked by reality. Remember all those high potential buy out candidates (Abbott laboratories), a strong pipeline of pharma companies waiting to put Parsortix to use, etc. Get real, if anyone was interested in this filtration units they could buy the company for a song.
For me, the only reason I have left my now much deminished £400 investment in Angle is the small possibility that the venture with Solaris comes to something, anything, over even half of nothing!!
were As I pointed out in previous posts, the FDA approval
On this occasion Management have given us lots of numbers. However, they deftly avoided giving us a clear picture on which to judge the future prospects of the company. We have received no revenue or operating income guidance just "political" and vague statement about the potential to reach cash break-even at some future date.
I keep asking myself why the sales performance in Europe (where we launched back in 2018 I believe) is so miserable.
The potential for an oral ID suppliment is equivalent on both sides of the pond. Any investor who ignores this glaringly poor performance in Europe is foolish. Circa a quarter of Europe's population are over 60 = 90+ million potential clients and so far next to none have taken to our remedy!
My conclusion is that sales will surely increase, as will cashflow and the company will eventually make it to break-even.
However, I firmly believe most investors will lose money from this point foward, institutional investors included.
Do your own research and keep asking questions.
Hello Moab,
I went away and did some research, then capped it off with the help of ChatGPT.
So, CTC's may be released to the bloodstream from a solid tumor well in advance of metastatis. Current research believes that the CTC's are the principal agents of metastatis. Many CTC's are released into the bloodstream often in clusters but the majority are killed off by the immune system.
Conclusion: Parsortix could be used as a cancer screening device but is probably a less effective test than targeting circulating tumor DNA particles.
The real money in the liquid biopsy market goes to the company that is FDA approved to answer the primary diagnostic challenge - “Does the patient have cancer?”. It explains the market value of companies like Illumina($26b) and Natera($6b); Angle has a market value of £35m.
A lot less but nonetheless sufficient amount of money in the liquid biopsy market goes to the company that is FDA approved to diagnose what character of cancer the patient has. This is where Angle’s Parsortix coupled with one of several tests on the extracted CTC’s has a role to play. For now Parsortix is only FDA approved for breast cancers. Prostate cancers would be a larger market which Angle hopes to address with its partnership in the U.S with Solaris Health.
So anytime I hear Newland refer to the liquid biopsy market I flinch knowing that the Parsortix addressable market is a minor slice of the whole.
What investors need to understand is the following:-
How many women are diagnosed with breast cancer annually in the U.S, in the U.K, and how many go on to have a CTC diagnostic test. How many test has Parsortix performed in the last year, how many were targeted, why the miserable up take, what is the strategy to have Parsortix adopted by medical practitioners in the U.S and U.K.
How long will it take to obtain FDA approval for prostate CTC extraction?
Why does Angle not seek approval for Parsortix as a primary diagnostic (cancer screening) test?
This last qestion is the most telling.
The risk here is that the one of the major players working on cancer screening (Illumina) will devise a screen which is sufficiently accurate to diagnose the cancer such that the need for CTC extraction and testing is reduced to less than 20% of positive cases, thus shrinking further the minor market slice addressed by Parsortix.
If anyone has any further questions to put to Angle's IR dept let's hear them.
I've notices comments on the NHS / Grail trial.
The BBC article states "The liquid biopsy detects tiny fragments of tumour DNA in the bloodstream and alerts doctors as to whether a cancer signal has been detected and predicts where in the body that signal may have originated. If early results are successful, a pilot screening programme involving one million patients over two years is scheduled to begin next summer."
Well, this goes back to what I posted previously, namely that the FDA approval of Parsortix precludes its use as a screening tool. So the NHS cannot use Parsortix for its screening trials. Nero was somewhat obtuse on this matter in his earlier announcements after the FDA approval. More recently he has been a little more clear on the matter.
When I read thru the FDA approval in detail to discover that Parsortix is not approved for screening I made a mental note to drop the value of the company substantially.
In 2018, was highly profitable (Net margin 24%) and efficient (ROIC 28%): Earnings per share were 59p
Four years later having sunk $400 mil. to acquire Sentry, Net margins are down to 6%, ROIC has dropped to 4% and as yet no increase in operating cashflow.
So either the original business has imploded or the acqured business is a dog. At an absolute minimum one would expect a $400m investment to yield a possitive cashflow, but not in this case - at least not yet.
Have Management given us any reason for confidence in the future outlook - Nope, zilch!
However the company's analysts are forecasting earnings per share of 23p (2023), 24p (2024) and 32p (2025).
So if the forecasts hold true then by June 2025 Craneware earnings will still be 46% BELOW THE LEVEL IN 2018.
Now, in 2018 Craneware had an Enterprise value of $355 mil. when the company was way more valuable than today. So, I reckon the current enterprise value of $474 has a long way to fall before the serious money starts to take an interest in this lady.
I would not be surprised to see the share price settle down at 800p (back where it was in 2016).
Everywhere I read namely, U.S market commentary, recruitment company trading updates / annual reports etc., I hear of a tight labour market and wage inflation.
Now hat has to be a strong tailwind for this company. So, I would expect sales to be up on prior periods and the share price to follow suit. DYOR.
BOJO my thoughts......
All along I (mis)understod that the use of Parsortix would forego the need for invasive biopsy procedures in the case of suspected breast or prostrate cancer. Since the biopsy is deemed necessary to confirm the patient has cancer and Parsortix cannot be used until such is confirmed, it follows that Parsortix cannot surplant the biopsy process.
What a bloody shame!
While I would prefer to invest in a company with less debt, iEnergizer is still a sound investment at today’s price.
1. The company is a cash cow.
2. It consistently produces returns on invested capital close to 30% (last 3 years) and free cash flow exceeds profits year in year out.
3. It has been producing on average 38m free cash flow each year over the past decade.
4. Outstanding debt to operating cash flow is a very reasonable 1,4x, most banks will lend this company up to 3,5x without covenants.
5. iEnergizer pays LIBOR plus 3.75% interest on its loans while it generates 30% + returns on that capital invested.
6. Show me another U.K listed “Cash cow” with 40% ROIC (2022) and valued at 9.4x cash flow!!
7. There is a reason why it is the only company to show up on Stockopedia’s Zulu principle screens.
So,……
IMO if you’re invested, sit tight, collect your 7% dividends each year and await the big one several years hence
– or -
Hope another ATOS comes along and values the company at 18x cash flow.
You should not be overly concerned about the 143m borrowed in 2021 to pay a bumper dividend.
The company did the same thing back in 2012 when it borrowed 134m in part to finance large dividend payouts.
In the following years it paid down that loan with ample cash flows.
Syntel was a similar case, Indian Co. Indian majority ownership, providing similar services principally to the U.S. It borrowed heavily to pay a bumper dividend. About a year afterwards in 2017 Atos Origin acquired the outfit at a premium. They obviously valued the prospective cash flows highly.
So, let's think it thru.
Joe visits the clinic for a prostrate check up.
Step 1 - Doctor does the finger test, maybe an ultrasound scan.
Step 2 - Doctor decides to go for a biopsy.
Step 2 (alternative) liquid biopsy test (by company X) to confirm physical symptoms. Tests come back possitive.
Step 3 - Doctor confirms patient has cancer.
Being aware that, in the case the liquid biopsy test, x% of detected cancers are in fact non-life threatening and do not require surgery / radio-therapy, the doctor may decide to engage Parsortix to harvest the CTC's and perform a downstream analysis to determine the full nature of the cancer.
So what's the addressable market value of this post diagnosis prostrate cancer?
What are the assumptions underlying the estimate value (i.e. No. of tests performed per year, average recoverable value per test?)
I find the best companies (read Management) provide their shareholders with clear business plan, numeric commercial targets, key performance indicators etc. because they are not afraid to have a score sheet.
So what about Angle ??
Shearclass, I can't disagree with any of your observations. Stated differently, what you're saying is that under current management the value of the company is greatly impaired, as I tried to point out.
Craneware paid circa $210m (incl apportioned goodwill) for "customer lists" but only retain 90%+ of customers. By all rights they should write off 10% of this intangible asset, so $20m instead of the $10m charged to P&L a/c.
In the end iTAN's are all sunk costs and play a minor role in prospective value of the operation.
However, they do represent cash that has been either well invested or poorly invested (as I believe) and this shows up in CRW's very poor Operating cashflow just reported. We have weaken the business model and there's no escaping the fact.
Let's hope a bigger fish will acquire the operation for its market reach and datasets. If they use a DCF calculation to value the operation then don't expect a premium to the current EV.
Craneware was a small, high margin / ROI% unit from 2015-2018.
The assets of the company are now close to 6 x higher thanks mainly to the addition of £468m intangible assets.
As yet there has been no improvements in profits or cashflow versus 2018. Sales, as one would expect have risen sharply.
Management have provided little or no guidance re future profitability or cashflows.
The share price has dropped back to where it was at the end of 2017 (when the company was more profitable presently).
Let's hope the coming update provides a roadmap back to 2018 operating performance, if not I guess the shares will head down towards 1200p.