FHC If you believe that advancing PYC’s current programs through...

FHC

If you believe that advancing PYC’s current programs through clinical trials should be PYC’s sole focus at the moment, and if the early stages of those trials demonstrate the promising safety and efficacy read-outs we all hope for, then funding of larger, later-stage trials is on the cards. In which case, the company will need to either raise capital or partner out one or more assets.

Much as PYC’s technology sounds impressive and its preclinical results are impressive, pharma is likely to want to see some initial clinical evidence of safety and effect before taking a calculated bet on PYC’s therapeutic approach.

An example worth considering is the 2022 Stoke Therapeutics/Acadia Pharmaceuticals deal.

In September 2021 Stoke announced interim results from a Phase 1/2a study in its lead asset in Dravet syndrome, an in-house developed antisense therapy based on its proprietary TANGO platform. Just a few months following the release of these initial results, Stoke announced a multi-drug collaboration (not including the Dravet syndrome asset) with Acadia under which Stoke received a US$60 million upfront payment as well as potential milestone payments of up to $907 million and royalties on future sales. The US$60m upfront allowed Stoke to further advance its lead program.

It’s quite possible that if and when pharma comes knocking on PYC’s door, its interest will be in using PYC’s capabilities to discover and design precision PPMO therapeutics to address its own preferred genetic targets rather than those in PYC’s current pipeline.

In which case, PYC needs to demonstrate that it has rapid drug discovery capability. Which is precisely what PYC aims to achieve from this latest collaboration.

As others have explained, this collaboration, which ostensibly comes at a cost of $5.5m, will at worst cost $1m.

But the potential gain from this collaboration could be a multimillion dollar discovery/development deal which can help fund the further advancement of PYC’s current pipeline.