Well - I would certainly love you to be correct, friend Tauren.
Pharmacological research is a difficult field and the results are always uncertain. I have had people ask me why I think IMU might succeed, when there are so many failures - even with "Big Pharma." My answer is always - Sure - success is uncertain. IMU has always been a speculative investment. On the other hand - when you look at their pipeline - every single one of their products came to Imugene with a prior history of detailed preclinical research and discovery by researchers with impeccable qualifications and experience. In the case of Azer-cel and Her-vaxx, there was also a record of success in human trials. (Many here will not know this, but Her-vaxx had a limited Ph 1 trial in Breast Cancer, conducted by the Vienna team, before it came to IMU. Azer-cel, of course, had both a Ph 1 and a Ph 2a conducted by Precision Biosciences).
Investing in blue chip "Big Pharma" is certainly no guarantee of success. CSL just announced, today, that their landmark Aegis-II Phase 3 clinical trial has failed. And that will have been a very expensive miss indeed. Aegis-II was their biggest clinical trial ever. It started nearly 6 years ago and they enrolled 18,000 patients! Source: https://www.csl.com/we-are-csl/vita-original-stories/2023/celebrating-a-cardiac-research-milestone
But today's announcement by CSL dashes those hopes. Their products - CSL112 - which aim to reduce "Major Adverse Cardio-vascular Events" following a heart attack, has failed to show any meaningful reduction. It was safe - but ineffective. Source: https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20240212/pdf/060908q5sfbc9y.pdf
So - ouch!
Of course CSL is far far bigger than that one product, with enormous recurrent income from existing approved products and many more coming up in their pipeline - but it just shows how even the big players can make a bad bet.
(Note: I'm not saying it was "bad science." In fact it was probably excellent science - and CSL will have learned a great deal. When something doesn't achieve what you expect it to do it doesn't mean you have done something "wrong" - it just means there is something extra you didn't know about, and you learn from that. Sometimes "success" is built on 99 "failures" followed by one "win." In terms of the science - every one of the 100 attempts might be excellent science, and the "success" is only made possible by the "failures." But we tend to only remember and celebrate the "successes" - and certainly it is the "successes" which bring economic rewards).
The same thing could happen to Imugene, but the chances of that happening across all four product platforms seems relatively low to me.
What we have seen so far - in clinical trials of the B cell vaccines; CF33/Vaxinia and Azer-cel (the trials conducted by Precision) - bears out what was seen in preclinical studies. All three platforms appear to do exactly what was predicted. We await later results for proof of just how well they do it. The fourth platform - OnCARlytics - is less advanced, but the preclinical studies are compelling.
Imugene's share price is depressed because the market is cautious and because Imugene's products are so novel and ground breaking. Results such as CSL's Aegis-II study will add to that market caution. But "caution" by the market should not be read as an indication of where this will all end up.
As you know, friend Taurean, I'm reluctant to put numbers to the potential market cap and share price of IMU, but real success in even one of their product platforms would make IMU worth quite a few multiples of its current value. What I find remarkable is that - so far as I can see - although I still regard it as speculative, Imugene has very real prospects of success in all four.
(20min delay)
