General Comments / Chat, page-2783

@Amfas since my comment is being discussed on this other company's forum I should add some context and depth.

1. I am not criticising the company’s management. Clinical trials are always complex and difficult and early stage imaging trials are probably one of the most complex because you have to balance gathering good data with inconveniencing the patient without being able to directly offer them a treatment benefit. Some problems are inherently hard and have no easy solution.

2. I don’t know what the company was told by their clinical advisors and CRO about running the trial here in Australia. If they were told by the experts that it would be easy and quick then it is hard to blame management for believing them.

3. Recruitment into early stage oncology imagining trials is not easy even when you can get ethical approval to pay the participants. The reason why is the patients are quite different to the normal healthy early stage participants (young and poor) and a payment that will motivate a young person may not motivate someone in their 60s or 70s to participate. There is a limit to which ethics will let you pay (that is if they will let you pay at all) and it just might not be high enough to make a difference to recruitment.

4. It is much harder to recruit in Australia than some other countries because of the structure of the healthcare system. In some countries there is in practice no healthcare if you are poor and so you can recruit just by paying for the treatment of the patient. This can make trials that are impossible to recruit here in Australia possible in other countries. This is sad, but I think many forget how luck we are here to have the healthcare system we do.

Everyone should take my comments on this topic as preliminary and limited - I just don’t have the data to be able to offer anymore than general observations. As I have discussed many times, one of my aims of posting here is to educate investors about the biotech sector in general and help create a pool of informed investors that can grow the Australian biotech industry. Better biotech investors -> better biotech companies -> more biotech investors -> more biotech companies -> better future for Australia.