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Alan Kohler speaks with David Blake, the Editor and Publisher of Bioshares, about his pick of biotech stocks, how investors should approach the industry and the impact of disruptions in clinical trials.


ByAlan Kohler · 19 Mar 2020
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David Blake is the Editor and Publisher of Bioshares which is the biotech stocks newsletter that analyses them.
David has been analysing biotechs in Australia for a very long time and he’s among the most experienced around. I thought it would be a good idea to get him to run through some of the stocks and how they’re being impacted both positively and negatively by the coronavirus crisis.

It's well worth listening to David Blake, the Editor and Publisher of Bioshares.
Table of contents:
Coronavirus cure
How to approach the biotech sector now
Cochlear
Cyclopharm
ResApp Health
PolyNovo and Avita
Clinical trials turmoil
mce-anchorDavid, obviously there’s a lot of biotechs on the Australian market that are talking about how they’re trying to come up with a solution to the coronavirus, is anyone actually close credibly?
In Australia the closest I think we have in terms of a company that can provide a relevant therapeutic is Biotron. They have been out there beavering away trying to use their particular family of compounds. One in particular, BIT225, some time ago trying to treat Hepatitis C infections, also HIV. They have been, interestingly enough, unlocking or working out what actually happened when they did a spot on HIV patients, and it turns out that it’s actually very good at activating what are called natural killer cells which are enemies of viruses. They’re at the moment putting their drug candidate, and not just their lead one, through testing with researchers to see whether it actually has a desired level of effect in knocking out the virus.
Why that stands out is it’s a different approach to other potential small molecule candidates around the world. This is a novel approach it detects an ion channel on the envelope protein of the SARS Cov-2 virus and when you can have a different mechanism that may not mean that the drug gets to help initially but then later on you have a problem with resistance to other therapies, that candidate whether it’s BIT225 or another one, could end up being still very, very useful. Because what we now know is that SARS Cov-2 isn’t away, it’s expected to become by the virologists and the epidemiologists, what’s called endemic, which means everywhere all the time.