I sold out of NEU at the time of their share consolidation in Nov 2017. Sigh.
Before that, I held on through the long nail biting time waiting for the top line Phase 2 trial results. There were many prophets of doom here on HC, but in my view there were also enough hints that Trofinetide was working - so I held out again the fear mongers and, indeed, the Phase 2 results arrived in March 2017 and they were great. Yay!
But then nothing seemed to happen. Months went by. No deals. The share price stagnated.... There were plans for a Phase 3. It looked like there was no outside interest in Neuren at all. And then they announced a 20:1 share consolidation. Well that was it for me. I decided there was no future in NEU and I sold out at a very modest capital gain at the consolidated price of around $3.20 per share.
NEU currently sit at $14 a share, so I definitely should have kept a firm hold of my NEU shares.
On the other hand, I invested the proceeds from the NEU into buying more IMU at 1.6 cents a share - which even at today's ridiculous sold down price of 12 cents is still around double the capital gain I would have made if I had kept the money in Neuren.
And yes - if I had a crystal ball 2 years ago I would have sold my IMU at 60c and bought it all back now for 20% of the proceeds.
But of course none of us can see the future.
The truth (retrospectively) is that NEU was a bargain back in Nov 2017 and it may well prove to be a bargain even now - at $14. They have plenty of scope to do better. They deserve to be more famous than they are. They have given new hope to many desperate parents too.
I think you raise a really good point, JDBL, in the context of Imugene. NEU had a couple of promising drugs, but their initial target (Rhett's Syndrome) was a relatively small market. Massively important for any family affected by Rhetts - for sure - but relatively restricted in commercial terms. Also a field (cognitive decline) where it is quite hard to really prove clinical effectiveness.
But despite that, NEU has moved forward and followed the science and, eventually, commercial success arrived. With more to come, I sincerely hope.
Imugene, by contrast, has 5 key products which are all progressing quite rapidly by the standards of clinical trials. (and a couple of product "platforms" that could see them expand their pipeline enormously. ie new B cell drugs or new variants of OnCARlytics) Each of those products shows the promise of major improvement in cancer applications which all have huge potential markets. In the case of Vaxinia and OnCARlytics, the potential market is as great as "all solid tumour types" - or 90% of all cancer.
I'm not saying they will definitely achieve clinical success in all 5 major products, or at the scale of "all solid tumour types" - but the potential is there, and the likelihood that all products will fail, or only succeed at a level below commercial viability, is starting to look quite low to me.
So NEU is currently sitting at around 3.9 times the market cap and share price it had back when their clinical results were promising, but there were no commercial deals in sight. Kind of like where IMU is now.
A similar bounce back for Imugene would see the share price back close to the 2021 high point - but the potential markets for IMU products are many multiples greater than the potential market for NEU's Trofinetide.
So yeah, with all IMU products (so far) showing excellent safety and genuine prospects for therapeutic benefit, I'm definitely learning from my NEU experience and I'm sitting tight. I'm disappointed, but not spooked, by the share price slump and I'm not selling a share. In fact I would be buying more now if I wasn't totally out of cash.
Personal opinion only.
Cheers
Dave
PS JDBL. Congrats for sticking with NEU. It's a winner!
(20min delay)