Whatever, a nice run up into the official close.
Now for the auction? |
If correct, kind of defeats the point of an 'order-driven' market with restricted trading hours doesn't it? |
Can anyone explain how the key movements in the share price, almost every day, are after hours (significant down following rise during the day - or the opposite) and before open (sometimes a big rise followed immediately by a large drop) or drop from the previous close. |
Excellent post. |
Masterly Mr President Sir |
 ygor,
There are some exceptional events in there, but that's sort of it.
When the Kingsman's founded this company it was pure drug discovery.
When John Dawson ran it then it became a hybrid drug discovery / CDMO services company - the main reason it has lasted 25+ years without getting a drug approved.
By the time Roch is running the company (interim CEO) then we have been trying to sell off / spin out the drug discovery side for some time and there are no buyers.
Frank comes in as pure CDMO (his background) and the drug discovery side of the business is gone now.
I think that's the main part which people (maybe mainly people who don't follow OXB well), haven't really grasped yet. They still think we are a big spend / cash burn drug discovery company which had a one-off windfall with the covid vaccine.
Reality is that our spend on drug discovery ended by Q4 last year and we now only spend money on developing drugs if a customer is paying for it.
Our costs seem to be somewhere in the £130m per year range and once sales exceed that (forecast to better this year by +35% next year) then happy days. How long before that is accepted by the market? Don't know.
The takeover thing is just a guess by me based on Novo saying recently that they intend to spend some of their weight loss drug windfall on services companies to the pharmaceutical industry. Well they already own 12% of this one.
Countering that we have a lot of long term shareholders (and shortly one very big new shareholder in IM) who won't want to see OXB bought on the cheap. Happily Novo have enough money to be very nice to them (and by default us too). I'm not joking either with that. We refer to 1bn in sales as a blockbuster drug because they are so rare. Wegovy brought in sales of about $4.5 billion last year and their market isn't fully mature yet.
They will soon have mountains of cash (isn't there some stat now about them already affecting the Danish economy with their income?). So, to my mind if anyone buys OXB it's going to be Novo. Conversely, if someone else wanted to buy OXB then how on earth are they going to tempt Novo out of their 12%? Hardly like more money is going to do it.
If you are thinking of some scenario here where it works for everyone then perhaps they wait until next year when OXB will make a profit, then offer a multiple on sales which isn't unheard of in this industry and 51% of us will say it's enough and that's the end of OXB as an independent company.
Might happen and might not. |
Harry....your comments on possible news flow are interesting. In a nutshell it seems to me we are being buoyed up on three fronts:-1. An improving profile as regards trading/turnaround prospects;2. Genuine takeover possibilities from pharmaceutical companies with very deep pockets;3. An share price that has dived by c.90% from its peak.As I have said before, OXB clearly has some very rich friends. Certainly enough to maintain my interest. |
supernumerary,
I appreciate that we talk about CAR-T here a lot (because it has been a great earner for OXB - and will be for a long time yet), but whilst most CAR-T use a vector (our bit) to program the patient's blood cells, CAR-T is only one example of the many uses for a vector.
A good example here would be the cystic fibrosis treatment with our LentiVector which goes into the first trial patients this summer. That isn't CAR-T but if it works will be one of those treatments which goes down in history. Fingers crossed for all concerned. |
It's never been really clear what our BMS deal is for.
We know it was originally to support Juno in some trial drugs which BMS now own.
We also know that mid 2022 BMS (presumably happy with what they saw) expanded that deal for 2 additional programmes of their own.
If you look at the annual report for 2022 on this link
Page 12 (which is actually sheet 14) has our pipeline as of that date.
BMS are 6 lines there but it gives nothing away as to what.
It's unlikely that either of the last 2 are Breyanzi (the first 4 ex-Juno wouldn't be either). If it were then they would have to do new trials with our vector and I think it's much more likely (and significantly cheaper / simper for them) to just ask us to make their vector if they are capacity constrained.
But BMS wouldn't be a new partner for us (which is the way the OXB email is worded) which only really leaves CARVYKTI (ciltacabtagene autoleucel) from Janssen Biotech, Inc (or as we call it J&J).
Plutonian suggested that one ages ago and I agree with that / think it's likely that shortly we will find out that we are going to make J&J's preferred vector for them. |
Breyanzi is the only CAR T cell therapy approved by the FDA for four distinct subtypes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, bringing this personalized therapy to the broadest array of patients with B-cell malignancies |
https://www.onclive.com/view/fda-approves-liso-cel-for-r-r-mantle-cell-lymphoma-after-2-lines-of-therapy |
It seems that CAR-T therapies are finding more and more potential uses:
Cell therapy reckoning: How a 'remarkable resolution of lupus' carried CAR-T from cancer to immunology
The patient had cycled through every possible treatment for systemic lupus erythematosus, yet at just 20 years old still suffered from some of the autoimmune condition’s worst consequences—endocarditis, pleurisy, arthritis and urine protein levels 40 times higher than normal, a sign of possible kidney failure. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage her poor prognosis, her care team at University Hospital Erlangen in Germany decided to try an experimental CD19 chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy against the autoreactive B cells causing her disease.
“This decision was not an easy one—we feared that she would suffer from a severe cytokine storm [a life-threatening immune reaction],” Georg Schett, M.D., one of the doctors who treated the patient, recalled during a lecture in early April 2024 at the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, after just one treatment, “she had a remarkable resolution of lupus,” Schett said. Her protein levels normalized after 30 days. Her anti-dsDNA antibodies—a lupus biomarker—fell quickly and eventually disappeared entirely. So did the autoreactive B cells that had been attacking her own organs.
“That was the first initiation that this might really work,” Schett recalled. Three years later, the patient is still healthy, living a normal life without treatment or signs of autoimmunity. Her B cells have even returned—but this time, they aren’t autoreactive.
This patient was the first of 15 whose CAR-T treatment for lupus, systemic sclerosis and idiopathic inflammatory myositis are documented in a series of papers published by Schett and his colleagues at University Hospital Erlangen. At the time of Schett's presentation, nearly all of those subjects continued to have no signs of disease and remained treatment-free. The results have sparked a frenzy of interest in CAR-T therapy for autoimmune disease, with companies like CRISPR Tx, Kyverna, Novartis and others investing in the approach.
Even Regeneron, an immunology powerhouse as one-half of the team behind the monoclonal antibody Dupixent, took notice.
[...] |
Chart is looking quite perky now so I've just repurchased a few. I couldn't understand why the bowl didn't complete first time round since £4 seems the natural resting place, from which it could then range as before between 4/5 level. I have kept a core holding from March but in this market we are spoiled for choice. |
Well, 311p about this time yesterday and 327p today. The difference in outlook? Zero. It's a funny old world.
Back to the news from OXB 6 weeks ago:- "Recently, the Company signed a contract with a new undisclosed US-based biotechnology company for the manufacture of lentiviral vectors as the client prepares for the commercial launch of its CAR-T programme targeting multiple myeloma. Manufacturing will take place in Oxbox, the Company's Oxford-based manufacturing facility.".
This link is everything approved by the FDA as of that date:-
For it to be a new company to us and CAR-T in MM, then there is only one.
A supply contract announced for a new mega pharma right now would be very nice. Yes, we will miss the chance of the FTSE review on close tomorrow, but providing a similar service for Novartis has been a very good "banker" income for OXB for a long time now. |
I like the glass half full outlook boadicea, but sometimes you just have to accept that life is very random and there is a lot of luck involved.
Back when we had RetinoStat in trials, so we are talking a rough decade here, that was another first for OXB and fixed the anti-VEGF eye disease market with one injection. Sanofi (partner, who paid for the trials) thought it worked well, but also thought that by the end of the trial process there wouldn't be a market size with enough share left for it to make business sense to continue and so dropped it.
Today, as I say a rough decade later, Merck is taking out Dame Kate Bingham's anti-VEGF start-up for $3bn with half up front. That company isn't even at the stage yet (re trial results) that RetinoStat was when Sanofi let it go all those years ago. If someone had offered us $3bn at that point then they could have had the Parkinson's drug and everything else for free. |
Meanwhile, believers are being given a generous amount of time to get their beans in the right pot. |
I'd be the first to admit that it's something I have no experience of - it's just my hope that what we see daily on the London main market is much more market forces than any kind of attempt at manipulation.
I accept what humans are, for example the recent story in the WSJ about the US banks currently negotiating their fine - because their employees who weren't supposed to be talking to certain other parties directly via memo / phone call / whatever, were texting because it wasn't specifically mentioned in the rules. People eh?
Unfortunately with OXB (and this is nothing new, as I'm sure lots of us recall JD raising this point in various interviews / presentations long ago), whilst they are in the happy position of being a service provider of a service that is very much in demand, the timing of any deal is in the hands of our customers - and with big customers it can take a long time.
Seb has also made a very similar point recently, that with the small biotech companies (57% of our work last year), things can happen very quickly because the founders often wear multiple hats, and so him or her saying yes is deal done (with a contract and start within weeks) - as opposed to the committees of mega pharma people with business degrees needed to meet before their giant corporation takes a step.
I'm pretty (very) confident that we win those small biotech contracts all the time (by that I mean something like a couple of new ones each month - which that KPI table should confirm, whenever and wherever they publish it), but I have this feeling in my OXB weather pinecones (much mentioned here) that something a lot more significant is about to drop.
Unfortunately it seems it will be after the quarterly review now, but this is just life. |
It would be comforting to think that every move of a SETs stock was in response to order flow but it isn’t.SETs aims to match order input but the system will require the marketmakers to get involved where bargains can’t be matched because they are larger than Normal Market Size ie NMS.The MMs can move their quotes up and down like a yoyo for no particular rhyme or reason,as much to stimulate business as anything else.
As far as the 3% + fall in the price of OXB yesterday is concerned that was probably due to the fact that US healthcare stocks came in weaker.Semiconductors were up,healthcares were down and leading the way was our old friend Moderna which fell 9 percent after recent gains..The market is a very simple soul and sentiment,sector rotation etc (whether here or the US) will exert a powerful influence on stock pricing,it isn’t all down to company specifics as we all know.The fact that the likes of Moderna is charting a very different course to OXB doesn’t preclude the market from throwing them all in the same healthcare pot and treating them rather similarly,short term at least.
Reassuringly,OXB appears to be developing soild technical support around 315p,a good base for the next leg up come further news flow. |
Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, have used CAR T technology to successfully treat not cancer, but chronic asthma using a mouse model. They present their findings in an article published in Nature Immunology, “A single infusion of engineered long-lived and multifunctional T cells confers durable remission of asthma in mice.” |
If OXB was an AIM share then I think I'd be more of the same mind, but I always thought that main market SETS was supposed to be much more transparent and less shenanigan riddled. If it is being sold down then I think it's much more likely that one of our past regular sellers just needs the money.
We're plainly going to miss the end of May quarterly review now (barring some miracle which I don't really expect), but that does then give them 3 months to get out more of the story (with any supporting news) that OXB no longer burns cash on operations and that the future is very bright.
Meanwhile any next trading day is another possible news day. |
If they keep the share price static and dull we all switch off I think and most stay in hold mode - so no one gets any shares into play.
So now they operate the perpertual shake - every few days a shake down to 3.10 on very low volume and it seems this also is not freeing up much stock into the market.
They either give up trying, try a super human push below 3.15 (a lot of support to battle with) or push higher and hope some have sells booked in just above the top of the current range...
I'm more than happy to wait here as long as it takes :)
nai etc |
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