Thanks for finding this. If correct and confirmed, the founders would get the second half of the sales price after reaching a milestone for the Lung Cancer test. But they did not have a chance to achieve the milestone, because the company postponed working on lung cancer in 2017 and never picked it up. At least this is what we can find in the annual reports.
However, I have no desire to join in this despicious mesogenous Irminger-Finger bashing. After all, the ideas expressed here are just assumptions.
Finally last week we had the long awaited flood of announcements – but with absolutely no information on progress - and as a good thermometer for real progress, unfortunately there was no upwards move of the SP. The question now is brutally open: Where is the pipeline?
1)Announcement1 BARD1 antibody tests: The BARD1 tests are on hold and being evaluated. Since Feb 2021 and further beyond 2023!
2) Announcement 2 SubB2M No progress. There is no confirmation of the famous 100% sensitivity and specificity for OC, reported more than a year ago. What happened with ELISA with CA125 for ovarian cancer, immunohistochemistry tissue biomarker, what are the results?
3) Announcement 3: Seems to follow the motif, “If nothing works, let’s start a new project”, the Exosome OC biomarker.
Here is my take:
Ad 1) It seems the company tries to play on time with the Legal Proceedings, as obviously the management is not paying for the legal fees from their salary, and in this case -Goliath against David – the company is Goliath.
Ad 2) SubB2M only works 100% for the same 42 ovarian cancer plus 20 control samples which they tested over and over again (2018publication,2021announcement,2022new publication). Within a whole year the company did not provide validation of these results on new samples. Now the company presents the deal with ResearchDX (RDX) as if it was progress. But smartly they only committed to the first step, a feasibility study: Meaning that there is a slight chance that one of the different SubB2M tests work at RDX, and if not, RDX,Industry expert will tell them that it should not be pursued.
Risky, but a good decision. No surprise that CSO Peter French, who came in with Sienna, resigned before facing the end.
Ad 3) IMO this is an intelligent project combining the IP the company has on exosomes with biomarker discovery, although it was announced now only to disguise the dilemma that nothing is in the pipeline for quite a while. The UQ group working on this project is no newcomer in the field and the new new CSO, Gregory Rice, has a long history with UQ and with exosomes (each CSO his special toy in this company! There is an advantage when dealing with incompetent board and management). This new test will be based on a) purification of exosomes from blood (with the company exonet kit), b) identifying protein biomarkers (or antibodies) or/and microRNAs on/in exosomes, and all this has to be measured with different methods for proteins and for miRNAs, and integrated in an algorithm. Thus, it is much more complex to get the raw data than the ELISA tests for the BARD1 tests or the SubB2M tests, and all the components then have to be integrated in one algorithm. No reasonable results can be expected before a year at least.
IMO the company shows incredibly low expertise. They present us a pipeline from which zero results can be expected for the next 12 to 18 months to come.More so, the company is hiding behind a law suit for the evaluation of the BARD1 tests. Was one year not enough for any average scientist or business expert to deliver an evaluation? In the current situation holding the BARD1 tests back can only be explained by the fact that the company assumes any progress on BARD1 tests would strengthen the plaintiffs’ case.
While this is an understandable position of the company’s defense strategy, keeping the BARD1 tests on hold without other projects moving forward is keeping ALL shareholders hostage to that law suit. The company is playing its legal case with one shareholder on the shoulders of ALL shareholders.
We invested into a company that can make a dream true- better diagnoses earlier. While the slow progress exhausts the patience of shareholder, postpones the time that patients finally will benefit from better diagnostics, the management and board is happy with the situation as long as they receive their bonuses and salaries.
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