From CEO Marc Voigt

I emailed Marc Voigt last Friday and received his reply over the weekend.
With his permission, I'm sharing his response, verbatim.

Dear xxxxx,

Thank you very much for your mail and thoughts. I can fully understand the anxiety such an announcement can cause, especially for many of our long-term shareholders.

The strategy was maybe not as radically changed as it appears. In the past years we have been working hard on the CVac program and saw disappointments and successes.
In fact Prima was so to speak the “CVac company”. This situations has been changing with the acquisition of Immutep. We have – as you know – now a portfolio of four different product candidates:
IMP321, IMP731, IMP701 and CVac.

At the AGM I stated that we need to actively manage our clinical development program to ensure best clinical benefit and optimal capital allocation. The most important CVac milestone is the CAN-003 final OS data mid of this year. As the recruitment and the regulatory interaction was very difficult in terms of CAN-004B and CAN-301, final read outs from those trials would be years away and have no impact in the shorter or mid-term strategy and value generation of the company. Just think of CAN-003, a 63 patient study which started in 2010 and where we see the read-out in mid 2015. However, these clinical trials cost a lot of money irrespective if recruitment goes well or not, especially in autologous cell therapy where you need to continuously maintain a very costly manufacturing infrastructure.

In addition one has to say that the market is partly skeptical in terms of autologous dendritic cell therapies, the Dendreon example, where a company with Provenge more or less being the single asset tried to commercialize such a product is certainly not helpful for the space. I believe that it is better strategy to aim to partner a product based on concrete data, e.g. based on final OS data. So just to be clear: CVac is not dead, but we stopped to develop it solely with our own resources, but will of course explore the best partnering settings to hopefully continue towards commercialization. With that strategy a partnering as a commercial event could come earlier compared to try to develop the product alone in PII and PIII studies. Of course I don’t know the final OS data of CAN-003, but if I am very confident in that respect.

If we still would be a single asset company such a situation and dependency could be very dangerous, however, we are not. We have other products which will be developed either by our partners GSK and Novartis and fully based on their expense or by ourselves in conjunction with a partner (Eddingpharm for IMP321). Looking at the trends in the industry and the costs aspects I believe that IMP321 is highly promising. Now with the benefit of having also acquired Immutep's active research lab headed by our Chief Scientific Officer, Frederic Triebel, we may benefit not just from the announced products of Immutep's but also from further new ones. As you can appreciate science is ever evolving so owning our own science lab headed by a prominent scientist & the founder of Lag 3 is an invaluable asset.

So in fact we have with at least four products also – to cite you – four rabbits in the hat, including CVac. Interestingly the initial market reaction in the US was quite positive. So while we faced a decline in share price by 8% at ASX we saw an increase by 16% at NASDAQ. I think it is quite telling how differently the markets reacted, one does not find such a situation often.

Best regards,
Marc