Territories and Indications and Licensees

Licensing deals for our three in house improved formulations of Docetaxel Cabazitaxel and Irinotecan

How many separate deals and for what indications

Will the drugs be licensed to one partner or multiple partners and in different territories


Friday, August 25,

Starpharma Holdings (ASX: SPL) (OTCQX: SPHRY) shares are down 30% on the back of an announcement from AstraZeneca. The insistence is that this is nothing to do with the dendrimers, the drug delivery technology, rather the drug itself being delivered. But it's still a blow to the development and so creates this share price slump.

The specific announcement: “Following communication from AstraZeneca on Friday 28 July 2023 and the subsequent release of AstraZeneca's H1 and Q2 2023 results announcement that day, Starpharma (ASX: SPL, OTCQX: SPHRY) reports that AstraZeneca has made the decision to discontinue the development of AZD0466, after an internal review, prompted by a small number of asymptomatic adverse events (AEs) that were unrelated to Starpharma's dendrimer drug delivery technology.”

The point here is that this is not - as so often in pharma development - the end of the idea. It's entirely usual for a failed test like this to mean the end of a programme. All money invested to date is lost and that's that. This isn't what is happening here. Or at least, the claim is that this isn't. It's the specific drug development that has failed testing, not the dendrimer drug delivery system.

There is also the quarterly activities report: “Starpharma (ASX: SPL, OTCQX: SPHRY) today releases its Quarterly Activities Report and Appendix 4C for the period ended 30 June 2023 (Q4 FY23). Starpharma's closing cash balance as at 30 June 2023 was $35.2 million. Net cash outflows for FY23 totalled $14.7 million, with a net cash outflow of $3.7 million for the June quarter. “During the quarter, Starpharma made significant progress across multiple DEP® programs and marketed products. We completed recruitment in the monotherapy arm of the Phase 2 clinical trial of DEP® irinotecan, and the Starpharma team is currently working closely with our specialist clinical partners to finalise patient data sets and complete quality control processes, ahead of reporting top-line clinical data from our three Phase 2 clinical trials. Top-line data for DEP® cabazitaxel and DEP® docetaxel as monotherapy are expected in Q3 CY23.”

For this stage of the game there's nothing wrong with that. They're funded, they continue to test, that's just how development pharma goes.

The problem is that AstraZeneca failure. Yea, even though it's not the Starpharma part that failed. At this stage of development everything is hope. There are no actual assets to value - everything is the hope value of what is being developed. If those hopes are lowered - by whatever - then the value changes significantly.

That's just the way pharma development works and something we've got to get used to if we wish to play in this game.