banter and General Discussion, page-10595

Agree with you, @ddwn. I raised the issue of board renewal and beefing up management resources with the company multiple times but know that it would be more appropriate privately talking about these things, so that’s what I have done with the CEO and Jane Bell. I fact, I got emails back from both SI and Jane Bell. Progress has been slow though more tangible in recent times - at least there have been some movements at the board level, but I am as impatient as anyone else with the lack of thought given to installing a fully fledged CFO and to succession planning. I think the fact that the CEO is still passionate about the business, as a founding entrepreneur/scientist, does not mean that
attention does not need to be firmly on managing these key issues. There are issues which could have been behind the dilutive (and “annoying”) capital raising last year, not all of them sinister, but I think one of them is the lack of signs of progress on getting the management resourcing/succession and the resulting lack of market confidence in the company. It’s a fact that Dr. Itescu has been there since the founding of the company, but any company will benefit from new management ideas. I know the biotech industry has been very difficult in recent times, so has the regulator (perhaps not completely wrongly so given the issues that needed to be looked at are critical to the product(s)), but there are things within the control of the company that could be done better. Given how I emailed Jane Bell and others last October about exactly the things that @Phaedrus talked about in his post, in October last year (note that rather than asking them about a CR, I asked them to be realistic about the often optimistic timeframe of the CEO), including spending a lot of time talking about royalty monetisation, I would be really not entirely surprised that some of the ideas have been taken up. Of course, I would be very happy if we hear about these things at the update.

However, I would have to say that really these ideas should come from within the company - it gives me little joy in boasting about these things as a shareholder, other than from the point of view that the company seems more aligned with shareholder feedback and the idea of earning an acceptable return at this stage of the company’s lifecycle. The very large blue sky potential will not simply be always blue sky, always on the horizon, if progress is shown on these other fronts.