Hello Fellow PTX'ers,Smooth seas never made a good sailor, but...

Hello Fellow PTX'ers,

Smooth seas never made a good sailor, but FFS this is getting ridiculous. Just one announcement and everything changes. Still bullish, still loving the multiple shots on goal, still loving the cash @ bank, still loving the SYC cliches....(I sound like Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg @ The Super Bowl).

Hear this - Biotech has been in a bear market since early 2021 (the leading global indices are the evidence), so when I start seeing these articles like this (see below), the contrarian in me can't help but get excited for the coming months - my strong recommendation is to hold as hard as you can and review come 25 December 2022.

And Welcome to the "Contrarian Club" - it's character building along the way, but it'll make you wealthy.

And still loving SYC.


AFR 15 March 2022
Steve Diggle to launch £1b biotech fund
Carrie LaFrenz
Senior reporter
Mar 15, 2022 – 4.33pm

Singapore-based investor Steve Diggle plans to launch a £1 billion($1.79 billion) biotech fund that he will use to scout the UK and Australian marketsfor new investments.Mr Diggle is best known for making billions betting on unpopular volatility tradesduring the financial crisis of 2008, but it is the biotech space that draws hisattention these days.“I’d much rather be remembered for doing something to help science to alleviatehuman suffering than just making a lot of money out of the financial crisis of 2008,”he told The Australian Financial Review.In 2008, Mr Diggle went from being prosperous to suddenly being very wealthy,but he was not ready to retire to a vineyard, saying that would be “boring”.ExclusiveSteve Diggle is eyeing more healthcare investments in the UK and Australia. Juliana Tan“I thought, if I was going to carry on working, I want to do something that wasworthwhile, more worthwhile than trading options against Goldman Sachs, so myfamily settled on biotech,” he said.His asset management firm, Vulpes Investment Management, was an early backerof COVID-19 vaccine maker Oxford Biomedica. His family money alone kept theLondon-listed group going during the depths of despair by investing $US30 millionover several years in the early 2010s, when it was posting multiple years of lossesand a cancer vaccine in development failed.Mr Diggle admitted the “risk management was not so great” on that big bet, but hereally believed in the company’s science, which led to he and his brother, Martin,first investing in 2000.Hitting the COVID jackpotOxford Biomedica has since had a few wins: it helps make Novartis’ Kymriah drugto treat child leukaemia. It has built a viral vector platform to develop products inhouse and with partners. (Viral vector vaccines use a modified version of a virus [avector] to deliver genetic instructions to the body’s cells).It has a portfolio of gene and cell therapy candidates in the areas of oncology,central nervous system disorders and liver diseases.But the biotech finally hit the jackpot when it was named as one of themanufacturing partners to help produce billions of doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID19 vaccine.“We focus on healthcare because we think there is a lot of money to be made,technology is moving fast to provide breakthroughs in treatment, especially cancer,and we think we have an edge through the quality of our team,” Mr Diggle said.“But we also choose to focus on life sciences and invest the majority of our personalcapital in it because we want to make a difference and bring these sciencebreakthroughs earlier.”Mr Diggle – a former Lehman Brothers and Barings trader – works with twoprofessors of biochemistry to review possible investments.Oxford Biomedica’s share price has more than halved since last October’s high of£16.78, but Vulpes is still up about five times its average investment buy-in of £1.50.Another big investment is UK-based Scancell, which is developingimmunotherapies for treating cancer.Biotech’s big opportunitiesMr Diggle sees big opportunities to take advantage of collapsed valuations of firms(except vaccine makers) that have been unable to continue human trials amidCOVID-19 but continued to burn cash on R&D. He will seek out platformtechnology companies rather than just drug discovery.“We want to take advantage of this incredible opportunity in biotech whereeverything is burned to the ground, and we want to raise a lot of money in thesecond half of this year to start a new private equity fund to invest in the UK,because that’s where our strength is.“We have also always been impressed by New Zealand and Australia........... Mr Diggle said Australian healthcare was a great place to test ideas and where “firstclass research is conducted”, but has “insufficient infrastructure to develop ideas,which means they wither or list too early”