screw the downrampers - fundamentals are excellent "I would have...

screw the downrampers - fundamentals are excellent "I would have hate to have bought at 17.5 on dec 15 when the stock was ramped"

I bought a parcel at 9.1 cents just a few weeks ago in the middle of all the downramping and the much-touted tax-loss selling - feels good to be up.

But even if I wasn't up overall on PRR, I'm comfortable with the stock's fundamentals - which are absolutely outstanding.

PRR is an investment play geared to an emerging immunotherapeutic revolution in the treatment of cancer. We are already seeing the first wave of this with the recent success of passive immunotherapies (monoclonal antibodies - Avastin, Herceptin, Erbitux etc...) and many in the industry expect that the second wave of these therapies, immunotherapeutic cancer vaccines, will hit the market within the next 3 to 5 years.

Which brings us to PRR's subsidiary CancerVac which is developing an active immunotherapeutic treatment for ovarian cancer - a cancer vaccine. This technology is not something that is still in the lab, the vaccine is presently mid-way through phase 2 clinical trials on the back of outstanding earlier clinical trial and laboratory results.

Two of ten late-stage cancer patients in PRR's CancerVac phase 1B trial are still alive and receiving treatment. All patients in the trial recorded a tumour-specific immune response (that is, 100% of them). Moreover, the therapeutic effects of this vaccine have been shown to be sustained over time.

These trial results were very much better than those achieved by Biomira in its phase 1B trial of BLP-25 - a therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer. Biomira's vaccine is based on the same antigen as PRR's CancerVac vaccine and has an identical mechanism of action. Only the delivery is different.

In phase 2B trials, Biomira's vaccine doubled survival in non-resectable lung cancer (survival extension of 10 months over control and running). Moreover, there are virtually zero side effects to the treatment - it is all but completely safe.

European oncologists presented with the trial data declared it to be "ground-breaking" and a "breakthrough". The Canadian Health Regulator (Health Canada) is considering granting an early marketing approval to Biomira on the back of the phase 2B trial survival data. And the FDA has awarded the vaccine fast-track status. Moreover, the FDA has explicitly stated that where a therapy for the treatment of cancer is a "breakthrough" they will not stand in the way of access. Some form of early or conditional approval is, I think, a distinct possibility given that 160,000 people die of lung cancer each year in the United States alone.

Biomira, after the outstanding results achieved for BLP-25 in lung cancer, is no doubt already aware that CancerVac's vaccine will prove efficacious - they are already talking about using it in combination therapy with their own vaccine (the mechanism of action is identical) . And, unsurprisingly, we are hearing talk of Biomira auto-electing to excercise its option over the CancerVac technology. This will trigger up to $20m in upfronts and milestone payments, and will yield double digit royalties on global sales (ex Australia and NZ to which PRR retains full ownership). Moreover, Biomira will pay for all development costs through to registration (a sweet deal by any measure). We are due to hear news on this before the end of the year.

As a comparison, Avastin has put on billions of dollars in terms of market cap for Genentech over the last two months as investors have realised that this antibody is effective in multiple indications - one of which is lung cancer. Avastin's performance in treating lung cancer is nowhere near as impressive as the vaccine developed by Biomira (BLP-25). Avastin adds just 2.3 months to life expectancy, causes horrific, life threatening, and even fatal, bleeding from the lungs, and is twice as lethal as chemotherapy alone.

Harvard University Medical School researchers have found that the antigen used by both Biomira and PRR is over-expressed on 800,000 of the 1.3m tumours diagnosed in the United States each year. PRR's CancerVac vaccine is likely to be effective in all these indications. The potential market for the vaccine is simply staggering in scale.

PRR's CancerVac technology is a very exciting investment story that promises ABSOLUTELY STAGGERING REWARDS for investors if things pan-out nicely. Show me, within the Aussie biotech universe, a technology which sports the promise of addressing markets of the scale we are talking about here - 60% of all cancers?

But PRR also has the FC-receptor technology (likely to be licensed out this year) which targets autoimmune diseases - another massive market. The company also has an anti-cancer monoclonal antibody, that has been shown to slow tumour growth in the laboratory by up to 80%, and has attracted, as a development partner, one of the leading companies working in this space (Medarex). Moreover, PRR has a cutting-edge, nano-technology vaccine that has, in animal trials, eradicated pre-existing tumours with a single injection - this vaccine has applications in animal medicine as well as offering promise as both an immunotherapeutic and a conventional prophylactic vaccine (again, stupendous market potential).

You don't have to be a genius to see that PRR is a screaming buy at a market cap of $16.5m - without mentioning the accumulated tax losses and the cash on hand (some 8m).

But you do need to look past the blatant, ignorant and shameless downramping of this stock and figure out the merits of an investment in PRR for yourself.

PRR has, arguably, some of the best fundamentals of any biotech in the Australian market and represents an excellent contrarian investment play in the current biotech climate.

Do your own research.

Dogbark