Yeah I was - I sold all.
Mostly a risk management move and with current market conditions, cash is king.
I also didn't want to see my capital go down 70%-90% in the loss. I'll essentially be waiting for a 7-10x just break even (this is possible, but to ride through a 7-10x in share price just to breakeven is not ideal).
Also, the CLTX CAR-T program is not a lock in terms of producing market-shifting results. The results for that would need to be as good as CAR-T in hematological tumours to turn market sentiment on this biotech. Here are the 3 scenarios: - If you do get those results, you would probably 2x from where the price is and I would be happy to buy in with more clarity.
- However, if you don't you will just continue your draw down to a 90% loss (requiring a 10x to break even).
- You could even have the market reacting very negatively on negative results and will cause this to go down 30-50% in one day.
The Cohort 1 and 2 results of CLTX CAR-T are not bad. It's mostly producing stable disease in the objective response rates, we're also not seeing any dose escalating responses between cohorts 1 and 2 (yet - will need more data). If I compare the results of 131-I-TM-601's results (CLTX radioisotope -
https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00591058 and here are the results:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16877732/), they only produced stable diseases and 1 partial response and never produce any dose escalating response (their best responses occurred in Cohort 2 and seem to be outliers). This company was acquired by Eisai (big pharma company that has many approved products) and never continued the program. To me, this is a big enough red flag to divest and not risk my capital to potentially more downside. Why would they discontinue the program if it was producing results? You could say 131-Iodine is not a good enough therapeutic agent for efficacy, but CAR-T has never worked in solid tumours because of the heterogeneity of tumour biomarkers and only works on hematological tumours which have a singular tumour biomarker (CD-19). If you get results those market-shifting results, I think CLTX CAR-T will struggle with durability. GBM is aggressive and it'll most likely pop up somewhere with different tumour biomarkers that would render CLTX CAR-T from being efficacious.
The next best products CHM has are CDH-17 CAR-T (interesting biomarker but will encounter durability problems just like CLTX CAR-T) and the CAR-NK (most promising) program, but those aren't expected to produce any results till 2024-2025 so waiting for 2-3 years for Phase 1 data is not ideal.
There are other companies that are more derisked, better technology, and more cash than CHM in the ASX and US markets.
(20min delay)