Ddwn When a biotech receives funding for a clinical trial, for...

Ddwn

When a biotech receives funding for a clinical trial, for shareholders, this is like the adult version of the tooth fairy coming true.

Biotech CEOs’s are not shrinking violets. When it comes telling shareholder about their successes, they shout it in capital letters in price sensitive stock exchange announcements.

Did Teva (up until they walked) fund the P3 Dream CHF trial? Absolutely. In black and white there are numerous statements from the company stating Teva were funding the trial. There was no ambiguity.

Work from the reverse.

If a company doesn’t state in clear and unequivocal language that someone else is funding a trial then this means you (the shareholder) are.

Apply a little bit of common sense.

NIH funding to trial networks (in the order of a few million) is to build the infrastructure to support multi-site trials.

So for example networks will have a one IRB approval process. So rather than have to gain approval from a dozen sites individually, one approval at the network level covers you off. Same for data management - there will be a centralised data management system. Etc.

The networks do not have ability to give anyone a blank check to conduct trials, which they then pass on to the NIH. It just doesn’t work like this. The NIH funding to the network creates a base … but for the network to be viable and sustainable it needs to attract projects to it – people with money who actually fund the trial – in this case Mesoblast.

Try your hand at a simple example ddwn.

Who funded the MSB Covid trial that was conducted in partnership with the NIH funded Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network?

Does MSB state in black and white that the network or the NIH funded the trial? No. What MSB say is – “The trial will be conducted in collaboration with the Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network, which was established by the United States National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as a flexible platform for conducting collaborative trials.”

Is the only place you will read that the NIH funded the MSB COVID trial on social media share trading sites in posts written by rampers? Yes. No-where else.

Are there any NIH project grant numbers, documentation etc that is required for accountability when spending millions of dollars of US taxpayers funds? No.

Therefore, MSB funded the costs of the Covid trial.

Don’t believe me? Just ask SI at the AGM if his conflict of interest disclosure for the COVID trial paper was correct. SI will look at you as if you are completely mad and say of course it was - MSB Limited funded the costs of the Covid trial.