General Comments / Chat, page-7817

I also feel that given the difficulties in recruitment, costs involved and size of the potential market that this trial may be de-prioritised in favour of something else that offers more bang for the buck, particularly in regards to size of market and ease of recruitment.



Estimated costs of $7.7 - $15.4 million dollars for the EMD AML trial is a pretty large portion of our remaining cash reserves for a trial that could end up having to run for much longer than anticipated (i.e. much longer to wait for results at potentially a higher than estimated cost). I don't know how much has already been spent on this trial but hopefully a lot less than that minimum figure.

Dr. T also re-iterated on FB recently that the buyback was not done to support the share price but to return excess capital to shareholders. Reading between the lines, perhaps the reason for the buyback being stopped is that there is no longer excess capital to return. i.e. plans have changed based on the EMD AML recruitment experience and possibly other factors.

I don't have a problem with plans changing when new information becomes available. The recruitment difficulties for the EMD-AML trial obviously weren't anticipated at the time. OK, we learnt something and deal with it. Hopefully we can reduce the speculation and learn more of any revised plans in the near future.

PS. In regards to the USD 541,760 donation to MD Anderson, that has always struck me as one of those completely WTF kind of things that really makes no sense from what I see. I really do hope that the reason for that becomes apparent at some stage, as it's a significant amount of money. For example, they start running the EMD AML trial out of MD Anderson, assuming they're finding a regular contingent of potential candidates using the screening methods.