While the announcement has raised new questions, it has also...

While the announcement has raised new questions, it has also answered a couple

Whose ASO cargo is being used in the flagship inherited retinal disease therapy program?

Professor Fletcher’s appointment gives PYC and Vision the ability to create proprietary drug molecules to couple with our delivery platform.

Rohan Hockings stated in the recent investor call that PYC didn’t have an MTA for its flagship program. He also mentioned that PYC had built in-house capacity to develop cargo and that it was possible for them to design their own ASO cargo. So here we have confirmation  - DIY is the plan.


Who at PYC has the expertise to run clinical trials?

LEI's co-investment in Vision gives PYC the ability to take drug molecules through the entire development cycle or from ‘bench to bedside’. The Ocular Tissue Engineering Laboratory at LEI has expertise spanning both pre-clinical and clinical drug development and evaluation.

We’ve known for some time now that the company’s main focus is on advancing its early-stage research into clinical trials. The company has even been re-branded to explicitly acknowledge that it is now a drug development rather than a drug discovery company. What wasn’t clear was where the appropriate clinical trial expertise was coming from. It is now.

From my notes made during the recent investor call:

More progress = more validation = more money
Looking for future deals with higher upfronts i.e. taken to at least IND stage

Obviously, a drug cargo + CPP asset is more valuable than a CPP alone. And a clinically-validated asset has more worth than a pre-clinical asset.

I’m rather relieved that no signing-away-the-value deal was announced today. As I wrote recently about the rewards that have flowed through to UWA from Sarepta’s A$500m pa drug, Exondys51

What I take out of this is that UWA handed over their work at a very early stage of development for ultimately a very modest reward. I suspect there have been lessons learned; hence the current PYC plan to first progress its tech into the clinic for therapeutic validation.