Let me start this email by asking you Prima BioMed shareholders a question – are you optimistic about the state of the world at the moment, or pessimistic? If you have been watching the evening news this week you are likely to be a little bit pessimistic because a formerly prosperous European country has just defaulted on its sovereign debt the way dirt-poor Latin American countries used to do in the 1980s, and there are fears that the result will be some kind of global financial contagion.
Me, I’m optimistic. Indeed, I’ve been particularly optimistic ever since my biotech investor friend Adam called up on Tuesday afternoon to say ‘Congratulations, mate’. After a moment’s hesitation just to check I hadn’t forgotten that it was my wedding anniversary, I said ‘Congratulations for what?’ and Adam replied ‘Celgene and Juno…check it out’ before hanging up.
That was how I learned that Celgene, the world’s 26th largest pharma company, with 2014 revenues from prescription drugs of US$7.5bn and an annual R&D budget of US$1.8bn, was sinking a billion US dollars into a collaboration with Juno Therapeutics (Nasdaq: JUNO), a Seattle-based cancer immunotherapy company pioneer. That’s right, Billion with a B. Celgene is putting US$150m into programs that the two companies will be working on, and it’s buying US$850m worth of Juno stock for a roughly 10% stake in the company. Juno is currently capitalised on Nasdaq at US$4.9bn.
Why such a hefty investment? I mentioned last week that one of the things that have made people excited about cancer immunotherapy was ‘… stories of kilograms of tumour disappearing from the bodies of patients, as has been reported with the new CAR-T therapies’. Juno is one of the relatively new companies working in the CAR-T space. CAR stands for ‘Chimeric Antigen Receptor’ and the T bit refers to ‘T cells’. A Chimeric Antigen Receptor is an antibody-derived targeting domain fused with a T-cell signalling domain. When you express one of these CARs on a T cell, that T cell has exquisite antigen specificity. What that lets you do is drum up, inside the body of the cancer patient, is a huge amount of cancer-killing T cells, to be sent more or less where they need to go, to the point where, in some cases, kilograms of tumour are just disappearing. Celgene, renowned as a highly forward thinking pharma company – these were the guys who rehabilitated thalidomide as a cancer drug some years ago - reckons there is a massive market opportunity here and has placed its chips accordingly.
So why was my friend Adam congratulating Prima BioMed on a deal a totally different company has just done? Because when money of this magnitude is moving into the new cancer immunotherapies from an established company with some pharmaceutical street cred, companies like ours are going to be in the spotlight. In addition, we at Prima probably have a few advantages over Juno. For one thing, CAR-T therapies are likely to be very expensive once they get to the market because they are individually tailored (or ‘autologous’, as we like to say). Our IMP321 soluble LAG-3 product is, by contrast, an off-the-shelf product (‘allogeneic’) that is easy and inexpensive to make. For another, CAR-T isn’t without risks to offset some of the benefits – if the patient gets too much of a ‘cytokine storm’ from the therapy, the result can be inflammation that is potentially life threatening. Consequently patient selection strategies are likely to be something companies like Juno have very much at the top of mind.
You can check out the Celegene /Juno press release and ponder its implications for similar companies like Prima BioMed by visiting http://ir.celgene.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=919929. For Prima the big news of the week was the mailing of the Notice for an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) of shareholders that will happen in Sydney on Friday 31 July. As you will know, shareholder approval is required for the Ridgeback A$15m funding which we announced on 14 May. At the 31 July EGM resolutions related to that transaction will be put before shareholders. The meeting will also be a great chance for shareholders to catch up with our directors and senior management, including our CEO Marc Voigt, and get an update on our progress in these exciting times for cancer immunotherapy. I encourage you to read over the documents we mailed – the Independent Experts Report makes an especially riveting read - as well as make plans to come to the EGM. I look forward to seeing you there.
Have a good weekend
Stuart
Stuart Roberts Global Head of Investor Relations Prima BioMed Ltd Direct: +61 2 9276 1224 Mobile: +61 447 247 909 Fax: +61 2 8569 1880 Email: [email protected] www.primabiomed.com.au
PRR Price at posting:
6.2¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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