annual general meeting review

Hello People, have just attended the AGM and was very impressed. Apologies that I couldn't stick around afterwards and meet some of you although I had another appointment at home at 2PM which I was already late for.

So, my overall feeling from the meeting was very good. The speakers presented well, Lee and Chris, and the board looked impressive, brimming with intellect, experience and wealth. An excellent combination in any board.

The commentary was very upbeat and there seemed an urgency around Lee's words when he was discussing the future prospects for Cardiocel and the HSV vaccine. He appeared supremely confident in the future for both and mentioned numerous times that Cardiocel was the standout technology currently available to surgeons and that the patch had incredible support from industry leading surgeons and centres in The EU and US. He mentioned a couple of times that FDA approval was expected mid 2014 which surprised me as I was expecting it January although let's go with Lee's expectations! TGA approval will likely come after FDA approval, Lee said late 2014.... or even after. The TGA tends to follow rather than lead in these regulatory matters.

I asked Lee afterwards "how many key centres across the EU and US are you expecting to be using Cardiocel after 1 year" and he replied 10. So I believe that is the initial target for 1 year from now. It is from the 2nd year onwards which I believe Lee is expecting the explosive growth in Cardiocel sales to really begin as the 1st year will be used to accumulate even further data and evidence to present to surgeons globally. So 1st Europe, 2nd US 3rd Asian markets...

I also asked Lee whether the surgeons at The Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane had performed any cardiac surgeries on adult patients yet to which he replied that he was unsure.

One point that Lee stressed was that Australian surgeons who lobbied their hospitals to use Cardiocel were really sticking their necks out as the regulatory procedure is quite burdensome and lengthy.... it attests to their confidence in the excellence of the technology and its superiority over currently available patches that they would make the effort. A great sign I thought.

Lee also seemed full of confidence and excitement when discussing the ongoing HSV-2 trials. When pressed on how long from start to finish these trials and FDA approval may take he said 5-7 years and as it's a therapeutic vaccine this is traditionally shorter than preventative vaccines.

All in all a very interesting day, one of our elder shareholders was quite upset at the change of name and gave Lee a hard time about it at the start and then voted against it in the show of hands although the change of name resolution was still passed. The gentleman was annoyed that Admedus could very likely be confused with Amadeus the composer or even a race horse. The head of marketing at Allied was then forced to do her presentation very early on in the piece to assuage the his fears.

Throw any questions you're interested in at me and I'll do my best to answer them from what I heard at the meeting.

Cheers.