George’s mentioning of a possible licence renewal to Ionis is...

George’s mentioning of a possible licence renewal to Ionis is interesting. It obviously would not include ATL1102 and ATL1103 going forward, and would need to licence some new drugs.

With appreciation that I may be suffering from the Dunning Kruger Effect that Meph refers, I would argue against it on the following points:

1. ANP has got enough on its plate developing ATL1102 as a potential platform drug and doesn’t need a couple more drugs on the shelf not being developed with the patent clock ticking.

2. Ionis has $3.6 billion in cash/short term investments and can develop their own drug assets.

3. I think we got lucky with ATL1102, but may not be so lucky on the next batch. It doesn’t make sense for Ionis to dilute returns on investment on a good drug asset in any case.

4. The listed licence structure has proven a hard slog to develop drugs using ANP as an example. Due to funding/CR limitations, it really only seems to work (still yet to be proven) for orphan drugs with small clinical trials and relatively small outlay, and even then it’s a stretch.

5. ANP can leverage off any ATL1102 DMD success to possibly set up their own drug discovery lab. It introduces the possibility of an indefinite pipeline of potential new drugs into the valuation (enjoyed by Neuren, Capricor etc)

6. The licensing structure is an arguable deterrent to third party partnership deals and/or a merger/acquisition.

7. Ionis took a big chunk of ANP shares at listing as part of their fee. We don’t need another chunk of free shares being issued now.