There is no way to dress this up positively, this is not good...

There is no way to dress this up positively, this is not good news. If after spending 10s of millions of dollars on it, Cognigram has limited value to Eisai in a healthcare setting, then it has even less value to anyone other than possibly Lilly. I assume Cogstate gave up the $15 million of guaranteed future royalty payments in order to try and protect the flow of Clinical Trials work from Eisai.

I am very surprised that Eisai has said we are not even interested in Cognigram on a non exclusive basis in Europe and China. It is very hard to see how Cogstate will distribute any version of Cognigram itself, they have tried before and it was so expensive that they cried UNCLE after blowing million of dollars. Any move .at scale, in this direction will come with significant cost both in terms of marketing and integration.

Sadly, I think it is also time to have a long hard look at Cogstate's position in the AD trials ecosystem. They are certainly well placed for the next few years but beyond that it is not so clear. They are so AD dependent that any competitive slippage here will be very, very painful. It is becoming obvious that in terms of their technology, in particular for decentralized trials and also in respect of voice based AI, they are starting to slip meaningfully behind Cambridge Cognition and their Winterlight Labs voice team. I suspect that their new Rater Quality assurance voice based AI software may start to take a chunk out of the ticket size that Cogstate takes from larger trials, even in the near term. Although, as a balance, Cogstate forgoing this revenue would also increase gross margins. It feels like Cogstate needs to spend significant amounts of cash to stay competitive, either on an acquisitions or on R&D.

There is plenty to ponder, moving my sentiment to NONE while I do so.