san diego - full summation of meeting, page-38

petesherl, you are right to ask questions and one could reach a conclusion that, if the core patents cannot be extended (as per the above), then why would anyone bother to licence the patents if they are not close to the clinic already, e.g. Calimmune. From such a conclusion one could extrapolate further and say that all we will have left will be the patents surrounding our own pipeline.

This is all very reasonable but it does leave out one variable, which is this: Literally hundreds of labs around the world have been working with ddRNAi for years. Many of these research teams have patents for specific applications of ddRNAi, e.g for Alzheimer's. If TT-034 proves to be safe and a feasible form of treatment, then even big pharmas that have no current ddRNAi platform will the trawling through the patents with a view to seeing which research teams are close to the clinic. The big pharmas (if they are interested) could then fund the extension of the research (mostly done in Uni's) with a view to commercialisation as soon as possible.

While this would only yield a royalties stream for a year or two for BLT, it would , nevertheless, require those treatments that could be commercialised in the next four years to be licensed. In particular, one could see big pharmas looking for orphan disease applications and accelerated FDA approval.

If I was a BDM for BLT, this is the story that I would be selling to big pharma. Regen has already adopted this model and it could well deliver some much needed cash to BLT so that we can get on with our remaining pipeline programs.

All is not yet lost but it does appear that our gatekeeper roll will vanish after 2018 so pushing the strategy above makes sense to me as it will allow us to maximise revenue between now and 2018.