Ann: Opthea Announces Plans for Potential US listing and IPO, page-16

Bioshares provided an update on Opthea earlier this week. Their take on the phase III AMD trial design and the pathway Opthea is taking is overwhelmingly positive. The title of the update was Opthea Scores Major Win on Phase III Wet AMDTrial Design (with respect to the FDA and EMA)

Here are some edited comments:

The benefits of needing to run only the one Phase III study against each of the VEGF-A inhibitors Lucentis and Eylea is considerable for Opthea and its shareholders. (i.e it will deliver considerable savings in cost and time). This combined with the clever trial design which will provide primary analysis of the primary endpoint on the subset of patients with wet AMD, who were found to be sub-performers to current VEGF therapy and relative out performers to combination therapy with OPT-302, places the company in a strong position with a well defined path to market.

This week the company announced plans to co-list on the Nasdaq, which could enable it to raise the required funds for this program. Other options include a regional or global licensing deal with Roche, Novartis, Regeneron and Bayer, who sell Eylea and Lucentis in various markets, or one of the biosimilar developers for Eylea or Lucentis (Coherus Biosciences, Bausch & Lomb, Samsung Bioepis/Biogen, Amgen, Momenta/Mylan)

My take on this is a Nasdaq listing is definitely not a done deal