This is interesting

Starpharma's no-licence fee and no-milestone fee deal with venture capitalists Medicxi is in it’s early phase and no disclosure has yet been made of any critical, tangible and meaningful progress apart from generalised positivity around ‘progress’

We all certainly hope for this partnership to bear fruit but there’s no guarantee. Interestingly, the buzzword that Medicxi, Starpharma and Petalion have used a lot is ‘asset-centric investing’, in other words a focused investment and focused research on a specific target/drug.

But what is asset-centric investing exactly?

It seems some of the core principles of asset-centric investing for venture capitalists are to:
control costs; drip feed capital; kill aggressively and only pay for directly actionable data.

Characteristics of this model also include a zero cost (in resource or capital) of acquiring the project in the first place.

So having got into bed with venture capitalists for no upfront licence fee and a no milestones fee structure, let’s hope Petalion’s early stage research is showing green shoots because the worst case is that it’s possible that Starpharma get dumped for zero tangible return, including the possibility of owning 15% of a research company essentially worth zero dollars.

Unfortunately given that Petalion Therapeutics is an unlisted entity, controlled by venture-capitalists and domiciled overseas, I would speculate that an information void for Starpharma shareholders is a possibility going forward.

Hoping for but not expecting a tangible update at the remuneration justification forum (AGM) next month.