I do tend to understand that it is the job of the seller to make its product the buyer's priority. A snippet from today's Q&A which gives a good feel of where 1AD is at with AD214.
"The next question is, shareholders have been told for 12 months that there are 21 interested parties to fund the Phase 2 program for AD214. Why haven't we been able to sign a deal?
Great question and a question that the management team and I, as well as our shareholders, are disappointed we haven't been able to complete one of these transactions.
First point to make is that this is a competitive space. There are multiple, as is with all licensing transactions for all drugs, there are a number of competing assets out there. And as you can see, while there have been a dozen transactions over the last five years or so, that results in around about two to three per year. So just because we have an asset, we still have to convert the buyers and the buyers are looking at all the alternative options available.
The range of responses we're getting from companies that have elected not to pursue a transaction range from because this is a first in class molecule targeting a novel mode of action, we'd really like to see clinical data in patients. Unfortunately, that's a catch 22 because we can't get that data without the phase two study. And that just goes to the risk appetite of some of these companies. Others have various individual reasons that they have raised for not progressing. Some relate to preferences around routes of administration. Some relate to preferences around preferences, sorry... around presence or absence of anti-drug antibodies. In one case, for example, we were in the middle of discussions with one company about to go into our data room in the middle of last year. They pivoted their entire corporate business development efforts to weight loss drugs, did five transactions over the next six months. And then in February, they phoned us again, sorry, in March, they phoned us again to say, oh, what are you up to with AD214? We'd like to restart discussions this time in renal.
So we are at the mercy of, to some extent,business development and strategic priorities of other companies as well. So the short line is that there are a variety of reasons why we haven't been able to execute a transaction. Some of them relate to the position of where the molecule is up to. Many relate to specific corporate issues or priorities within our partners. For those that have dropped out, we've continued to add new partners into the mix.So we continue to have a pipeline as people cycle through. And as you see from that example I just talked about, there are companies who are coming back to us at later stages once their priorities are reset."
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