This is from Michael Frazi's recent report. The elephant in the...

This is from Michael Frazi's recent report. The elephant in the room is the $70-$100 million raise to fund the stage 3 trial. In my opinion, this is why the interim data has been pushed back to late May/June, to put us in the best negotiating position if the data comes back with positive results.


Syntara has a near term catalyst coming up in the second quarter of this year. We had a tiny position nearly two years ago and supported the company in several capital raisings subsequently.

Then late last year they had a really good result where they announced the interim results of their trial, which were already good enough to basically say the trial was a success.

Of course, in the final six months things can change. It's still a small trial; there's only 16 people. Perhaps some patients sadly pass away unrelatedly because they're extremely sick patients. That could change the outcome. Similarly, the positive effects that were seen in the first half of the trial could reverse, then that would also be negative. But it's unlikely given that we’ve already seen extended benefit in some patients who weren’t expecting anything.

If the company reports in line with the interim data, this is an extremely undervalued company. It’s trading on a ~$120 million market cap. Equivalent transactions in the United States were all over a billion dollars.

They do need to raise somewhere between 70 and 100 million AUD, which is potentially challenging with the current market cap. But I do think the final trial result will open a lot of opportunities, and if the market doesn’t see it, there will be partnering opportunities like we saw with Neuren Pharmaceuticals.

There's a huge amount of interest in the space and there's no disease modifying treatments available. This is one of our highest conviction positions, and something we’ll know a lot more about soon.

This shows a brief summary of the data:

Symptom score reduction was 62%. Competing trials were at 30 to 40%. And patients really stabilized, which is an extremely positive result.

In this disease, myelofibrosis, there’s just JAK inhibitors which alleviate symptoms until the side effects of the drugs become so high that patients can’t take them anymore. That’s how bad it is, and how poor prospects become.

So, it's very exciting that Syntara has designed these drugs in Sydney and got these early results.

The good thing about Syntara is that the more you learn about it, the more you like it. And this is the company that had a long difficult history, with plenty of dilutive capital raisings, and I don’t think many people in the market have done the work.