Charles Jillings, CEO of Utilico, energized by strong economic momentum across Latin America. Watch the video here.
Now just 10p up from when they announced the exosome news a month ago. The market can seem illogical at times, but patience is almost as good as research when that one bit of key news comes and the major licence deal is in the bag.
Anyone else find the timing of this afternoon's RNS in relation to the outgoing CFO's options a bit odd? Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but could we be close to one of the conditions for the options to vest, and the company has sought last minute clarification from their advisors (following an oversight) and notified the market accordingly?
I've not encountered such a notification before, has anyone else? Timing certainly seems unusual to me anyway.
PC01 - I agree with your sentiments. If it was private it would given a fair value multiples of what the AIM market currently assigns.
The risk adjusted present net value assigned by the likes of Edison, Allenby and Stifel all put the company between £200 to 250m based solely on the hrpc platform (and they rather harshly only assume a likely of success for hrpc at around 30%).
If the company signs a licencing deal for exosomes you could at least double that valuation. If it signs one for ipsc, then its many multiples again.
The current valuation is frankly laughable. There's too many opportunities and avenues now open for this to languish where it is much longer. The reward is beginning to overwhelm the risk, in my opinion.
I think the scale of the opportunity is going to quite rapidly expose itself here. iPSC platform has the potential to be the biggest area of the company. There's been lots of very large (billions of dollar in upfront and milestone payments) deals done for equivalent technologies in the last few years. If rene can demonstrate POC here, then the opportunity is really significant.
Some transcript below about the iPSC programme and the comments that our CEO has made about them in recent presentations...
". . . and there's another programme that I haven't talked about, which is the iPSCs where we also have huge potential over the next few months. . . "
". . . I didn't go into the iPSCs any further, please go to our website to look at that. It is an earlier stage programme than the exosomes, but the potential is enormous . . ."
One day the market will see what's happening here, until then we must patiently continue waiting and shaking our heads in disbelief.
I've seen the following text in an RP support forum from someone who contacted jcyte regarding the phase 3 trial...
'Good Morning,
The P3 trial is now slated to begin in early 2023.
Kindest regards,
Jenny
Jennifer Clinton
Clinical Operations'
Not sure why it's now delayed so much, but seemingly reneuron could be moving ahead, since we're expecting to commence a single pivotal trial in H2 2022 (pending suitable readouts from the current expanded phase 2a study).
News article from the University involved in the exosome research. If you are using google chrome then it should automatically translate into English with any luck. If that doesn't work, then you'll have to learn Spanish. Buena suerte!
https://saladeprensa.usal.es/node/128851
Extract below from the 'Annual Report and Accounts 2021' (published 6th Aug 2021).
'ReNeuron is exploring multiple strategies for loading exosomes and has signed a further four separate research collaboration agreements with major pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies on these projects during the period.
These collaborations have demonstrated efficient loading of nucleic acid payloads in the Company’s exosomes and functional payload delivery, in vivo, to the brain and peripheral tissues via systemic administration.
Specifically, target knockdown by exosome candidates was assessed in multiple brain regions and in key peripheral tissues including the heart, the kidney and the skeletal muscle. Evidence of target knockdown was observed in each of these organs suggesting these exosomes have the potential to deliver payloads to therapeutically-meaningful levels to a variety of tissues.
These studies have also anticipated that exosomes are well-tolerated, laying the foundation for expansion to functional delivery studies. The Company has initiated two additional collaborations with leading academic institutions in the UK and
mainland Europe. One key aim of these studies is to consolidate data from a recent pilot study which showed that exosome-loaded growth factors can engage target receptors in the CNS. Confirmation of these findings will enable further studies examining functional delivery of growth factors by the Company’s exosomes.
In addition to exploiting natural exosome tissue specificity, ReNeuron has also now successfully decorated the surface of its neural stem-cell derived exosomes with a specific tissue targeting peptide. This proprietary peptide was modified to enhance binding to the exosome surface, resulting in a several fold increase in surface binding compared with unmodified peptide. This complex has been shown to be stable, enabling the next phase of this collaboration, which aims to confirm that the peptide promotes exosome targeting to additional tissues in vivo. This peptide platform has the potential to generate further targeting peptides that would rapidly expand the therapeutic reach of ReNeuron’s exosome candidates.
Further data across these collaborations are expected during the course of the next six months, which, if positive, will enable subsequent potential outlicensing deals with the Company’s exosome platform.'
The last line is of particular interest; obviously with the news announced on 11th Oct ('clear pre-clinical proof-of-concept that ReNeuron’s novel exosome drug delivery technology can effectively deliver therapeutic proteins to the specific region of the brain affected by several neurological diseases') means that we should expect outlicencing deals to now be forthcoming. However, that last line also suggests to me that they are expecting further data across these collaborations to be forthcoming in the near future. Very exciting times ahead.
Agree that deals will now happen for exosomes. Olav has previously stated a few months ago that POC data for exosomes was expected in Q4 2021, and that the licencing deals can take a few months to negotiate, with him then suggesting Q1 2022 as being a potential timeline. Well, given that the POC data has actually come at the start of Q4, it's not beyond reason that we could get an early Christmas present this year, with any luck.
For reference, Codiak publish POC data for their exoSTING exosomes in Nov 2018; then 2 months later on 3rd January 2019 announced their major deal with Jazz:
'Codiak to receive $56 million upfront, up to $200 million in milestones for each of five targets, additional preclinical development milestones of up to $20 million, a co-commercialization option on two products, and royalties on future net sales'.
"The field is so large we can do a lot of partnering, as well as keep some programmes for ourselves . . . kind-of endless opportunities. The goal is to build a UK biotech champion".
One day the market will wake-up to what's going on here - the potential is huge, and it's getting significantly closer to becoming a reality with each passing day.
I mentioned this morning that I hoped an interview would be forthcoming, well here it is. Brilliant, the excitement is palpable:
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/962825/reneuron-breakthrough-exosome-tech-delivers-therapeutic-proteins-to-hard-to-access-region-of-brain-962825.html
Easier to let the CEO explain it in his own words from the July 2021 preliminary results call:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jg6EQaxyr1E
Skip to around 30m for main discussion on exosomes (whole video is worth watching for overview of all the programmes and company itself).
Some of the transcript below for exosomes:
'So exosomes are nano-sized vesicles that are excreted by all cells in the body, and they're part of how cells communicate with each other. And so it's basically a natural liposomal delivery system. It's possible to hijack this system, either to use it as a drug delivery system or even as a therapeutic in itself, or as a diagnostic tool. Our current focus is on the drug delivery bit, and we have collaborations ongoing on that.
On Page 21, you can see some of the advantages of what we are working on. The first is that we've noticed a favorable distribution across the blood brain barrier. That's one of the biggest hurdles in drug therapy is how to get drugs into the brain efficiently. So we are exploring that now to see if our exosomes can answer that. We've shown ability to load micro RNAs and proteins, we've shown stable and high yields with a clinical-grade product. Obviously, our starting point is a GMP product, which is [GP] and CTX. We've been working on this some time and so we have established analytics, and we have seen a free scalable process already established.
On Page 22, a little bit more on the collaborations we have ongoing. So the 3 partners we're working with, their names are undisclosed. We would wait on disclosing that until we actually have a licensing deal, which should follow from a positive proof of concept. It's all about -- it's focused on delivering our partners' payload, and they are siRNAs and mRNAs for the moment. And the way this is done is that a partner sends the payload to us. We load it into our exosomes. They pay us for that work so that we can cover our costs. We send them the new construct back to the partner, and they run animal studies in the chosen indication to see if we can knock down the target with an exosome-delivered gene therapy. Now if the animal data comes back positive, we would expect then that our partner would like to take it forward. We own this new contract 50-50, so they would then obviously need to license rights from us to go forward.'
So the main point here is that they've been waiting to publish proof of concept, and now they have it, they expect licencing deals with the major pharmas they have been collaborating with. The other party will pay upfront fees along with milestone payments as it progresses through clinical trials. The scope if huge, and this isn't even the lead programme for Reneuron, the main programme is for retinitis pigmentosa, where they already have some industry leading data and now evaluating the treatment at a higher dose, before starting a pivotal trial H2 2022. News flow is looking great for the foreseeable future.
I'm amazed that we're only 12% up at time of writing. Value is baked in here now, exosome licencing deals will happen over the coming months, just listen to any of the presentations from the last 18 months if you need guidance on what the company expect to happen once we have POC data in-hand for exosomes. Transformational day for the company.
'Significantly improved delivery of functional proteins to the brain demonstrated in vivo Exosomes have potential to transform effective drug delivery for key neurological diseases.'
Also worth bearing in mind we are still around 30 to 40% off the yearly high here.
'The in vivo results are key in showing that ReNeuron's exosome delivery technology offer a striking higher stability, more targeted delivery, and an increase in potency, therefore potentially solving the delivery issues that can be experienced with therapeutic proteins.'
https://tools.euroland.com/tools/Pressreleases/GetPressRelease/?ID=3974434&lang=en-GB&companycode=uk-rene&v=
"This is exciting news for the major pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners that we have collaboration agreements with and underpins the commercial opportunity that our platform provides."
Licencing deals pretty much nailed on imo. Absolutely brilliant rns, the coming months are huge for this company.