No commercial revenue in first half of year, came from grants and interest, not a good sign. Although, on the bright side they have a payment from Jansen received in 3Q, so should be interesting to see how much that is for?
Like the toned-down director statement, since things don't look good, but their is some potential.
Advanced deal discussions with other companies? Sorry, but my idea of "advanced" means you are past termsheet and actually negotiating the contract (which can take 2-10 months itself), which doesn't appear to be their meaning. When you spend $500K a year and attend 10-15 partnering and scientific meetings per year, I would hope you are "discussing" with someone.
Still looks like burning $500K a month to me, and since they had $3.6M at end of Dec, that means $2.6M at end of Feb, leaves about enough money until end of June before you need to announce new fundraising or some other income. Maybe a license comes through, although I just don't see it happening by June, in my opinion.
Not surprised at them trying to apply for grants, and trying to jump-start internal pipeline, but really appears too little too late, depending on where the funding for another year of operations comes from. Its too bad, because I think they are on to something with the new libraries, but it is going to take time to do and you really need compelling data to convince people this is going to work, since Tat is from virus and has been around for 25 years and everyone and their brother has worked on CPPs for a long time with little to show for it, so their are a lot of doubters, like it or not. Developing a system to find peptides that get out of the endosomal pathway and to cytoplasmic targets is a very nice technology, especially since their cell selective peptides all appear to hit extracellular proteins specifically to those cell types that recycle into cells via endosomal pathway ((not surprising since viruses and bacteria are usually engulfed that way)). Important to note that cyclosporin A and Tat do not go through the endosomal pathway, and some peptides do directly penetrate via passive diffusion. So you can't buy everything they are saying in their slides cause they are just focusing on the part of the story they want to sell, which is business. Some of the posts on this page act like these guys have come up with something no one has ever thought about, and it just couldn't be farther from the truth.
If you read between the lines on Nick's comments, they really haven't started much work on their internal pipeline, he said waiting for sustainable revenue before attempting new programs. I have no doubt they are focusing all efforts on the Jansen project right now, as they should be, and/or trying to convince Roche to do something with those previous BEN peptides.
I think Tony said CD40L program was worth $400M at one time on a post here. I applaud Tony and Wayne for diving into the science and trying to figure out what a company you are invested in is really doing and where their position is. I think that is fantastic. But with that, you would be wise to review some of these fields or therapeutic spaces they are going after, for example you would find that CD40-CD40L was one of the hottest targets 10-15 years ago, many inhibitors identified, many looked fantastic in mice models, all failed in humans, cause 1. mice didn't model humans at all for inflammation/immune disease, and 2. CD40-CD40L interaction is important for B cell development and alot of important functions, making its targeting very difficult (side effects). You would see that numerous antibodies failed, even though through mouse data, the data was fantastic. You would ask yourself, how is a big peptide any better than the past molecules, which were excellent. No one will touch CD40-CD40L with a ten-foot pole now unless you took it into humans yourself. PYC likely picked the target back then because it was a well known PPI (protein protein interaction target) and did serve as a nice "meeting presentation" slide deck, but that is about it. I heard back in 2009 they were trying to outlicense the program for $5M, killed me. Good luck with that.
In summary, as I have said before, there is nothing break through about their technology or platform, but that doesn't mean that they can't identify some potentially very useful and valuable delivery/carrier peptides for cell targeting, and they appear to have a nice system for screening their libraries for doing that now, and seem to be finally composing the right libraries to look for those types of candidates. I think if they had, say 2 years of cash on hand, I would say they would have a very GOOD chance of turning this business around and become fully sustainable and turn out to be a nice little story. But I fear them being an almost 10 year old company running out of capital raising/ financing options (also being an Aussie biotech doesn't help) is just putting tremendous pressure on them. Hopefully something comes through in the short term and gives them the boost they so dearly need, but it is not going to come from any scientific meeting presentations.
For me I am left to wait for 3Q financials to see what shape they are in at the end of March, what the Janssen payment is, and maybe a ray of sun in the way of some good news.
PYC Price at posting:
2.7¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
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