 With the financial health warning here that I am a card carrying optimist, I actually think you will end up with more than that RBC target.
I'm far from an expert / insider on the workings of the market, but even I know that good news for a small cap stock goes unnoticed by most of the main market players. Some might be aware (especially if they held previously) but still can't buy because we are not FT250 at the moment.
Second part of the OXB double whammy is that most of the people who bought in during 2020/21 did so because it was a covid stock they had seen in the news and not because of anything about gene delivery, which we of course know is OXB's crown jewel (first in man lentiviral vector, first commercially approved lentiviral vector).
I think that last paragraph there is a lesson in what a single word which the general public recognises can be worth. A word like malaria maybe?
The new commercial CAR-T deal in March (still no details) is the biggest thing for us in ages and they seemed to imply in the results presentation of the following month that they haven't yet included it in the guidance. On top of that there are now of course a line of late stage deals (so in pivotal BLA or registration trials) and we know, because it's a point Stuart has made often, that commercial supply is where the big money is.
I'm very pleased with the amount of work Seb's team is bringing in at the very earliest upstream process development stage, but I don't think we will be shareholders by the time the successes from those drugs reach the end of their trial journey.
Back to me as an amateur market watcher and I'm struggling to remember a stock which rerated slowly before settling gently on fair value. I'm sure you understand this much better than me, but the momentum traders and the algo machines seem to chase anything well past fair value once noticed - much like OXB was chased down when they worked out that a couple of institutions had to sell. So really it's often more wild swings of expectation / speculation rather than anything particularly specific about the company itself.
If I'm anything like close in my guess that they are having to spend some of our cash pile now to recruit for a volume of work they didn't expect to have this soon (big hints in the last RNS) then when that work pays off from next year onwards, the returns on our cash spent will be very good.
My tealeaf / pine cone forecasting senses all tell me that the interims (which we know are basically the full year guidance with 85% locked in) will be very good for '24 but brilliant for '25.
Appreciate that I mostly preach to the converted here, and so we all know that next year is already guided for OXB's record best ever revenues, but even the lowest guiding analyst of the 8 forecasting next year (probably numis) is still guiding better than our record covid year - of course without the AZ vaccine revenues which were 87% of our bioprocessing revenues that year and drove us to £15.
It just makes no sense, but then many much smarter people than me have noted that the market proves itself to be irrational over and over again.
I can see some rough sequence of events here where the amount of won work, the late stage work turning commercial and some wildcard (maybe malaria vaccine production) has us crashing back into the FT250 and then possibly way past this CDMO sector average multiple as a lot more people who suddenly can buy OXB again take a look at the corporate presentation.
Somewhere on that path I think Novo make a very friendly offer for the much bigger company in 3 territories now (remember £15 was just Oxford at the time) and that's that. |
I think we will gradually rerate over the next couple of years.
I bought into the RBC £17 target. |
Good morning Harry. I haven't been looking in here much lately because you said that you were going to take a sabbatical. Didn't seem to last very long! Being mathematically trained, I've been slightly struggling with all of the about vectors on this thread. It was explained to me by ChatGPT that a mosquito is considered a vector in biology because it is the delivery system of the pathogen malaria. So now I get it. While I was chatting I asked ChatGPT to assess the probability of a bid coming in for OB at some point. Rather surprisingly it came up with 50 to 70%. Thought that might cheer you up. |
Many thanks Plutonian. |
Also maybe TRiP ?
The TRiP SystemTM works by transfecting a plasmid encoding the bacterial tryptophan RNA binding attenuation protein (TRAP) in production cells. A TRAP binding sequence (tbs) is inserted upstream of the transgene in the vector genome. In production cells, in excess of L-tryptophan, the TRAP protein binds to the tbs sequence and blocks translation of the transgene mRNA.
As previously cautioned, I know roughly what OXB does. How they actually do it is a different matter altogether. |
Josef,
You're honestly over my head with this one. For difficult technical questions I usually shine a giant P into the night sky and it awakens Plutonian from the bat cave.
I do know that some of OXB's special tech is labelled U1 and U2.
U1 is RNA related - see this release as an example
U2 is not RNA related but did have some popular hits before their lead singer went a bit strange. |
Yo, Harry!
A quick little update from the north. This piece of information was pulished the other day:
hxxps://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Compositions-comprising-sequence-specific-endoribonuclease/WO2024165645A1.html
As you can see it concerns an endoribonuclease. It has been expected for a while, and I have been looking forward to it.
Naturally this folds into the RNA space. Previously a T7 RNA polymerase which is a more common enzyme in the RNA space. This one is said to be totally unique and hopefully a door opener.
Does OXB do anything in this space or is it the wrong answer to our question ?
Greetings from Norway |
AAV team presenting Wednesday September 11th 4pm on Webinar Hosted by Xtalks.
Stimulating though that sounds, maybe a scientist amongst us might want to take one for the team and report back with the larger print summary? |
I'm not convinced it's a risk outside of high risk groups and those close to them Super, but I'm not a professional - just a currently bored investor - so my opinion doesn't matter.
I think the other vaccine possibilities with Oxford University, i.e. Lassa fever, MERS, Malaria via Serum, Junin and NipahB are all good candidates.
Countering that, and doubtless you will have picked up on this vibe, but since the boss of Novo said that he was going to use his weight loss drug windfall profits to buy up speciality service companies to the pharma industry, and remembering that he already holds a very large chunk of OXB, I think it's only time now until he comes for the rest. That's also my assumption of what Blackrock are circling OXB for.
If I'm correct then there's only likely malaria out of all these which we will see earning good money for OXB before OXB is a Novo company. Just my guess and all that. |
Interesting paper, but note that it's nearly 2 years old, and since then we have at least one new variant which, as I understand it, is more transmissible and more harmful. An available and usable (eg no special refrigeration/administration requirements) vaccine is critically important. |
No worries,
This is from much brighter people than me but anecdotally if you just read the stories of people who have contracted it then it almost always seems they have caught it from someone else with the same interests.
I think GeoVax's multi-strain covid vaccine for the clinically vulnerable is probably a lot more relevant to us as shareholders. |
Harry - that's what they said about HIV originally, and look where that ended up :¬( |
Thanks Harry. The W.H.O have issued a warning. I would have thought it more Dangerous than ST. |
We have yes, inherited from ABL via GeoVax
See right at the bottom of the list.
I'm cautious of giving my non-medical opinion on that particular disease as I don't want to end up in one of the new gulags for a thought crime, but whenever they describe it in the press, it always seems to me that they are going to great lengths to talk around the fact that it's basically an STD and so for the vast majority of the public you'd have to be staggeringly unlucky to catch it. |
Harry have we any interest in MPox vaccine. |
I'm sure there are still some buyers, but with the summer holidays and the notification of the half year results / presentation (5 weeks today), I think it's unlikely that there will be anything to generate more interest / buying before the results.
It all seems very positive and there's obviously a lot of recruitment going on (both here and France) which can only really mean two things:- 1) they are extremely busy, or 2) they are losing a lot of staff. To my mind Yarnton is the clue that they are very busy.
I'll keep tracking the partners / customers we know of, quite a few of which have interesting plans for H2, but all the signs are that Frank is building up to another big show for the 23rd. Should be an interesting presentation. |
so they still buy oxb |
Nice trade 150000 @3.54 1/2 few minutes ago. |
Did someone spill their coffee? |
is this one of the quietest trading volume wise in a while - do not check each day...but seems the summer holidays are having an effect for OXB? |
Yes, I like the trial too - short trials with clear results - that's what you want, particularly as it also avoids the need for control arms. It'll be interesting to see how much dose-related effect there is. A good result will hit every news agency in the world, that's for sure.
Fingers crossed! |
I've noticed before that a lot of trials we are involved with exclude women of childbearing age. I think that's pretty standard for our therapy area and if it works safely in the treated group which excludes them, then at some future date someone makes a decision on risk vs reward.
I'm quite positive about this trial because it will read out quickly and be obvious to the patients. If it works then everybody involved in the consortium will have done a really good thing and it will very justly be big news.
I still think though (and good early data on this may be one of the triggers) that at some point before this could become commercial, Novo will ask the top 5 shareholders how much they will take and that's the end of all this for us - other than perhaps a passing interest of what might have been. |
Any ideas about the exclusion of pre-menopausal women? I initially assumed it was about the passage of modified genes to offspring, but with a 15-year follow-up they'll likely have to face that issue anyway. And don't the sperm get modified too? My biology is purely (if that's the right word) practical, so not clear about the implications of these gene mods. |
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