Ann: New CEO Appointed to Accelerate Global Growth, page-20

At the risk of stating the  obvious, it's a little shy of 2 years since RGS announced positive results from a Phase 1 safety trial of Progenza in patients with knee OA.

Now,as I understand it, most of the intervening period has been focussed (unsuccessfully to date) on getting a clinical licensing deal with a Japanese company to (among other things) conduct a Phase 2 trial of Progenza in Japan.

So what really concerns me is that it seems like the previous 2 years have essentially been dead time for Progenza (our flagship), with further development and assessment sitting in neutral and on the back burner, until a clinical licensing deal in Japan can get done.

In the meantime, competitors in Japan are presumably making progress with their own partnering and Phase 2 trialling arrangements.

While RGS appears to have made some progress with AGC in mass production of Progenza dosing, unless I'm mistaken, in all other respects we have been and look likely to continue to be marking time, and frittering away some of our early mover advantage in the Japanese market, as the months and years continue to tick away.

So, Panorama, while I doubt whether the RGS share price is being punished by the market because the change in CEO is being seen as a negative. I do think it's likely that for all the additional skills Leo Lee seems to bring to the table compared to his predecessor, the market is dubious about his ability to simply step in to his predecessor's shoes and pull a rabbit out of a hat in the short term. If he does, he'll be flavour of the year for RGS share holders including me, but unfortunately, it seems the market is betting against such a result happening any time soon.

With all of that being said, I continue to like the potential product pipeline that is looming for RGS and remain happy to modestly nibble away at sellers offerings as the SP starts to re-plumb historical lows.

zeno9