AGM

The first face-to-face AGM for some time takes place in 10 days, on 17 November. Regulars here would know that I love to question the CEO and then write a report for HC devotees, but this year I will not be able to attend.

I hope that someone else will take on this task, because an AGM is a great time to hold executives accountable for their actions; or in this case, their non-actions. It defies common sense that our new CEO in an interview said that pre-clinical assets were the next catalyst for the Company, with no mention at all about upcoming interim data points for three current clinical trials.

I hope to use this thread to identify questions that should be asked at the AGM. But first, some thoughts from Graham Kelly:

Graham

We arehearing next to nothing about the status of the Company’s 3 clinical studies.Plus, Dr Mautner said in a recent interview that the most likely next catalystwould come from CRO-67 coming into the clinic and that would take about a year.She also talked about the coming focus for the Company being on thepre-clinical drug programs. A year is a helluva long time to wait for good newswith the share price in the gutter. What’s your view of this situation?

Bob

Happyto respond on the basis of what’s in the public domain.

TheCompany’s drug pipeline certainly deserves being talked up. We should all beexcited by its potential. So, no criticism there.

CRO-67,the pancreatic cancer drug, is an exciting and potentially very valuable drugasset. It’s first-in-class, it meets a need that no other drug appears to becapable of meeting, it looks on track to get key patent grant. It ticks all theindustry boxes and I fail to see how it won’t be snapped up by a major.

WithM&A deals more and more involving pre-clinical assets, drugs like CRO-67are prime for the picking.

Theother pipeline assets mightn’t get the headlines, but they are all excitingprospects that were put in place to ensure a post-Veyonda future of theCompany.

Whichbrings me back to your question. The Veyonda clinical program is the main gamecurrently and that deserves to be the headlined news. The Veyonda programdeliberately has taken a multi-functional approach by combining it withchemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. That’s a considerably de-riskedstrategy made possible by the multi-modal way that Veyonda works. No singletreatment is going to work for every cancer patient, so having a range ofdifferent ways to use the one drug just adds to its value.

Eachone of those 3 studies, and the IONIC study in particular, is capable ofdelivering proof-of-concept data early on that could serve as a major catalyst.

Bytheir very nature, clinical trials are slow-moving creatures, with the enormousindividual variation in cases meaning that data needs to be treated withcaution until enough patients have been treated to account for thatvariation.

Nevertheless,IONIC, DARRT and CEP trials have inbuilt review points involving the merits ofcontinuing with the study based on drug safety and evidence of benefit, and Ilook forward to hearing from those review points in all 3 clinical studies overthe course of the coming year.

Graham