A comparison of Prescient’s pipeline as presented last August...

A comparison of Prescient’s pipeline as presented last August with the pipeline presented now spells out why PTX’s share price is currently in the doldrums and why shareholders have become somewhat disenchanted.





Last year (and even the year before that), OmniCAR was the headline act. At that time, PTX’s “targeted therapies” were lucky to even score a mention towards the end of  Steven’s many presentations.

Now, the PTX pipeline has been turned on its head. Steven now headlines PTX-100, no longer even talks about PTX-200, moves on to talk about CellPryme and finishes his presentation by talking about OmniCAR without even mentioning the indications in which it is to be developed, yet alone a timeline for any OmniCAR clinical trials.

To be fair, Steven flagged the pipeline pivot in this year’s March Quarterly

The macroeconomic headwinds facing biotechnology worldwide have hit cell therapy developers particularly hard. Investors have demonstrated a diminished risk appetite and aversion to the expensive clinical studies that cell therapies require. There is also a lack of enthusiasm for undifferentiated and overlapping programs, and whilst OmniCAR clearly stands out from its peers in this regard, it is not immune to the broader sector sentiment. Similarly, cell therapy companies in US and Europe continue to trim their own development pipelines and continue to lay off a considerable proportion of their workforces.

From a business development perspective, this has naturally created a challenge to the adoption of OmniCAR by potential partners that were otherwise eager to evaluate OmniCAR to create next generation pipeline assets…. Prescient is in the fortunate position to have a robust cash balance and believes that it is prudent to conserve these reserves, whilst the market remains uncertain as to when negative sector sentiment may turn. Advancing this novel platform into a first in human clinical trial will be extremely expensive to conduct and will expend the Company’s cash reserves quickly, especially alongside a Phase 2 PTX-100 trial. Instead, Prescient is taking the opportunity to further optimize the OmniCAR platform pre-clinically, incorporating feedback from potential partners and the latest and most robust developments in cell therapy, including gene editing.

Advancing OmniCAR in this responsible manner will position the platform favourably for when the broader cell therapy sector regains momentum.

The end result is that OmniCAR has been put on the back burner due to monetary constraints, PTX-200 is going nowhere (but may still play a role in Cell-Pryme). Cell-Pryme will be the near-term focus in terms of selling shovels (demand for expensive platform shovels has dried up on the Car-T goldfields) and the star (and only) clinical program will be PTX-100 because it’s PTX’s fastest and cheapest clinical prospect.

Trimming the sails, battening the hatches, shovels overboard and all that…