Harry....quite a big buy came in this afternoon which was encouraging to see. Perhaps your next advent calendar story should be a brief history of the OXB share price since listing! |
 Wednesday, and working day 8 on the advent calendar countdown.
Not wanting to do an ambassador's chocolates here and spoil you all (especially those who have already bought popcorn for this afternoon's xTalks webinar), today's calendar door opens on current events and the Biosecure act just voted through by the US lower house.
Still has to pass the senate and yes horses will be traded (I'm trying to avoid the gulag again and you all know what I mean $$$) but this potentially has huge implications for OXB (and any other specialist CDMO outside of China).
Literally, you are CEO of ABC right now and need XYZ. Do you go the China route and risk delays, penalties and falling foul of the world's policeman or do you look around for someone else outside of China to hedge your bets with? For very specialist CGT CDMO there isn't a lot of choice. It means more work for OXB and more work means more money.
As for today's featured partner in the advent calendar countdown, it's going to be a quick reminder of one covered only recently (Oxford University labs) and their Lassa Fever programme.
A reminder of the relevant OXB link
"Two new adenoviral vector agreements with Oxford University have been signed, including a Clinical Supply Agreement for the manufacture and supply of adenoviral vectors for a vaccine against the Lassa virus". |
Just a quick reminder of an earlier post, re the presentation tomorrow for those who want to tune in.
Harry S Truman 19 Aug '24 - 19:49 - 8512 of 8599
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? |
Remember that top 5 stocks to own story the other day? (Motley Fool and a guy who didn't seem to know that much about OXB seeing as it was his pick).
Today Peel Hunt (and remember they are no longer house broker - so no obligations / duty here)
The UK shares to own as interest rates fall
Peel Hunt sees one of the biggest impacts being in healthcare and life sciences, where valuations are built on future cash flows. The run of rate rises has diminished their appeal, leading to one of the sector’s most testing periods since the financial crisis.
The bank said: “As we turn the corner, it would be reasonable to assume that a more stable inflationary environment will also see some risk-appetite return for higher growth companies.”
In Peel Hunt’s coverage, the Buy-rated stocks that could see support include FTSE 250-listed PureTech Health and Syncona and the smaller duo of Oxford BioMedica and hVIVO.
Perhaps a little premature to jump to a conclusion based upon two separate news stories a week or so apart, but it seems possible to me that slowly, slowly the investment market is being warmed up for our revaluation after the interims. |
Thanks Tuco,
I was struck with the idea of "the 10 days of interims" (a bit like the 12 days of Christmas). So we've done Sardocor and today CARGO, and my list of clients where OXB have given us at least a good hint of a name is about 22 in number so it should be possible, but we will see.
You know yourself what one good commercial partner has been worth to us in Novartis. The number of partners OXB has these days makes eventual multiple commercial supply contracts like that pretty much inevitable, but to my mind it's just the question now of how big that income stream becomes / is forecast to become before someone else wants it more than we do. |
Morning all in the land of opportunity and sunshine.
For today's entry in the boredom relief interim results advent calendar challenge (I can't compete with mass prisoner releases organised by professional comedians) I present a recent Nature article entitled "Editor’s pick: Cargo Therapeutics".
Seems a very positive article to me, but I was drawn to this passage "Bicistronic and tricistronic CARs are hard to make, for two reasons. First, the vectors require long sequences, which can impair viral packaging, disrupt transduction and reduce CAR expression. Ports says Cargo carefully screened for transduction efficiency and high-quality lentiviral titers before selecting CRG-023. The other challenging issue is T cell exhaustion. “You put two or three CARs in the same cell, there’s concern that the cell may get overactivated and undergo exhaustion and activation-induced cell death,” says Neelapu. While a legitimate concern, says Ports, “we’re simply just not seeing it. We see that the total level of CAR receptor expressed is comparable to monospecific CARs.”.".
My selections from that quoted paragraph with annotations:- (next gen) "CARs are hard to make, for two reasons. First, the vectors require long sequences, which can impair viral packaging, disrupt transduction and reduce CAR expression." AND (god bless OXB) "Cargo carefully screened for transduction efficiency and high-quality lentiviral titers" AND (regarding problems) “we’re simply just not seeing it".
Where am I going with this one? I'm pleased you asked.
Whilst research licences are usually free, once a go / no go decision has been made then a contract is needed and CARGO Therapeutics has been a contracted secret squirrel partner of OXB since June 24, 2022 (you can find that in their 8-K forms).
In 2022 it seems initially just for lead product Firi-cel (CRG-022), but as of March 4, 2024 they came back and amended the contract as "Oxford Biomedica manufactures and supplies to the Company certain lentiviral vectors (“Vectors”) and grants to the Company a non-exclusive royalty-bearing license under certain of Oxford Biomedica’s intellectual property rights for the research, development, manufacture and commercialization of T-cells transduced with such Vectors (“Licensed Products”).".
Seb only told us about this on 20th September 2023 in the interims (hence my previous point about them saving up good news for the interims presentations) see this link where he says:-
"I am taking here three names, some that we know very well and you don't. Cargo is one. The agreement has not been made public yet. It's the first time that we're using publicly their logo and some information here, although we had signed with them back last year, first agreement on the early programme. We're currently in phase two, extremely successful. I'll let you look at the successes of Cargo, but we're extremely happy to support them."
The usual caution here that I may simply be seeing what I want to see, but an editor's pick in Nature talking about the challenges / successes with a next gen CAR (CRG-023) and OXB as the tech partner / manufacturer for the vectors.
CRG-022 is most relevant as in people / in Phase 2 means big news (good or bad) soon (soon being a relative term in biotech), but more importantly I think, showing OXB able and selected to support the coming better mousetrap in CRG-023. |
Just looked in. It appears that Harry is back to form and responding to each and every post. At length I guess from previous form. Has the share price improved since my last visit? I don't know - or care. |
Thanks Harry but the technology is a bit beyond me. I'm still at the stage where is vector can be described as a mosquito where the insect is the delivery system and the malaria that it's carrying gets delivered once it lands on its target! |
Hello again Ygor,
That sounds like a storm response to me (CRS) which is a known common issue when an immune system which hasn't previously "seen" a problem suddenly "sees" it.
Not specifically ours, but an explanation to 3rd gen. |
Harry...I was really thinking of a chart for the vector diagram. The kind of thing you'd see hanging on the wall of a better-class science lab. Numbered vectors running vertically down the left hand side with an explanation besides each one of them. All ruled off of course. Anyway, I get your drift on the direction of flight. As an aside, I can tell you that the melanoma that was overwhelming my daughter by the day like some medieval disease was stopped in it tracks by T-Cell immunotherapy. The only problem with it is that once the T-cells wake up they operate like a Gatling gun and can start attacking parts of the body that you'd rather they didn't. The name of the game then is a regular wide spectrum of blood tests to make sure everything is working as it should.Let there be no doubt, however, that this treatment is a game changer. |
Ygor,
I'm not a scientist and can't explain the science of generational vectors to you other than to say it's a bit like biplane, monoplane, swept wing, afterburner. Each one improves over the last - in our case with with safety / capacity / manufacturing. I only really need to know what the vectors do (e.g. deliver genetic information to target cells) and that they do it well, but the science of how they achieve it is for people with very specific science degrees.
This is OXB's 4th generation
Random point here:- It was May '23 when OXB launched their 4th generation and at that point 6,000+ people had been treated with LentiVector.
Look at the OXB website page rather than that datasheet and scroll down near to the bottom. Last time they updated the website it was 8,000+ patients.
Another 2,000 patients in 16 months? If we were a US company we would have planes up towing banners with that written on it. |
You obviously remember the same legal case where he had fallen out with his manager over money and his spending habits were aired in court. I forget the exact figure now, but he had spent something like 300k on flowers and the judge enquired as to whether he considered that a little excessive. He replied no, adding that he liked flowers. Amazingly talented but a tad crackers. I think Johnny Depp is one of the biggest spenders, which takes some doing in a world where people like Travolta have a 707 parked outside the house. |
"..spending it like Elton at the florists."Another classic HST phrase! |
Harry/Steeplejack5th generation vectors and Warren Buffet - music to my ears! 5th suggests loads of movement but you'll have to produce a chart some time Harry to show what it really means!Warren Buffett - I've got Berkeley Hathaway shares in my portfolio but still had to write an email to one of my former work colleagues yesterday to explain to him why. As far as I'm concerned he"s a star!Off for a swim in the hotel pool now to cool off. |
Ygor,
Very pleased to read that about your daughter. Something which always puts everything into perspective.
Our posts crossed there, but aside from my running theme here that OXB are one of Novo's 8 growth investment picks (and their only CDMO) which makes me 90% convinced that we are soon a Novo company (see recent Novo boss speech), I'm also a realist.
I accept that our IP will be copied to varying extents in regions where our law is ignored, but I'm happy enough that in the territories where we have protection then we will do well.
As for keeping up, well OXB will be working on 5th generation vectors now, but of course it's the companies we support who are really in the shark tank / arms race of technology and to a certain extent we will share in the success of the winners. |
So much of life is random. I know we all think it isn't, and that it happened because of x or that we somehow saw it coming, but mostly we simply react to things which ordinarily couldn't be predicted. It's mostly luck.
With OXB it's struck me for years that the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
We'll not do the full book again here, but TroVax very nearly retired a lot of us early, then it went to nothing and could easily have marked the end for the company when our TroVax partner (Sanofi) liked the look of our gene therapy eye drugs and saved us.
The eye drugs were firsts and looked very good when Sanofi got cold feet and thought that at the end of long development costs, the projected big selling drugs would be going into already saturated markets and gave them back to us. Very nearly once again for OXB and the market back in doom mode.
Happily Novartis were looking for a vector to use / someone to make it in their new CAR-T venture and noted that OXB's gene delivery LentiVector was first in man and had been used very successfully in human eyes and brains by then. They signed up and changed the company's fortunes.
Then came coronavirus and basically crewed the world. So OXB went from having a commercial partner in Novartis and a lot of other partners in clinical trials to having a commercial partner in Novartis and a lot of clinical trials on hold as the hospital beds (needed to be at least on standby for clinical trials) were reserved for covid.
Disaster for OXB, disaster for our partners, disaster for poorly trial patients and their families clinging to hope.
OXB then becomes one of 11 manufacturers for the AZ covid vaccine (and the only one they kept the contract open with at the end of the pandemic - a different story) which meant that OXB left the pandemic with most of our partners still very battered with holds, but enough cash earned from vaccine manufacture to see us through. Not everyone in this business was so lucky.
If you look at the financial reports which follow then OXB has the commercial Novartis work and not much more as the AZ vaccine work stops a year earlier than planned and most of our clinical / pre-clinical partners are at best walking wounded businesses as a result of covid restrictions upon them.
What do OXB do? The one commercial contract (Novartis) was golden, but nowhere near enough to support all of OXB. They had a huge amount of cash but were spending it like Elton at the florists. Something had to be done.
They did what must have seemed the most logical and rather than simply sitting it out as world leader / first in man / first FDA approved with LentiVector, decided to buy their way into the bigger AAV market.
Homology were willing to sell 80% of their AAV I.P., their manufacturing experts, the knowhow, and the manufacturing facility in Boston for the snip of 180m USD, sweetened greatly by guaranteed work on Homology's own drugs.
Back to the running theme of the lord giving and the lord taking away, what happened next? Homology were savaged like a lot of other biotech companies during the last few years and their chosen route was to abandon gene therapy (and the work we would be paid for supporting) whilst merging with Q32 to try to save their shareholders something.
On the face of it another disaster for OXB (and perhaps even a factor in our recent CFO change) but the reality is that we now get to buy Homology out of their remaining 20% (next year) much cheaper than ever imagined, and at the last results 42% of the new work won was contracts for OXB's improved Homology AAV vector.
In time that will come very good for whoever owns OXB, but quite a bit more AAV work required before it pays back what it cost us.
It's been the business equivalent of the Hokey Cokey, but to continue the party theme here - OXB has seen a lot of contemporaries fall away and could easily now be the one left holding the parcel when the music stops.
I always thought Stuart was our best presenter. Not too technical (because he wasn't a scientist) but very relatable and a good listen. I remember him saying that the money earned by simply knocking out a lot of something - even at a less than commercial rate (the AZ vaccine) - was a revelation to everybody at OXB. Whilst it wasn't a revelation to Seb and Frank (now Thierry and Mark too) who came from a CDMO background and already knew that.
Our new drug R&D department is gone now, with perhaps a tinge of sadness that we will never see an OXB in-house drug approved (slight glimmer still that someone will take Axo-Lenti-PD / ProSavin) but with the consolation of the savings of 10s of millions every year from now on.
Yes I have rose tinted glasses, but I feel we are basically here now. We have so many partners that it's pretty much a statistical certainty that we are partnered with trial drugs which will get FDA approval and are then tied to us for commercial supply. We really don't need that many of those to be golden. Chances are we will get many more than that.
On top of that we have the random / wildcard possibilities of the triple bonus score - for example why the world's biggest vaccine manufacturer asked to reserve one of our biggest bioreactors for a decade.
A fortnight today Frank will have read through what I expect to be very good figures as he only told us weeks ago that profitability next year is still the guidance, but it also seems that Frank (unlike JD who kept results presentations pretty much just for the results) likes to save up news for a big show. It should be a good day.
Unfortunately we are still at periscope depth as far as the wider market is concerned, but I'm confident. A company with this much work in this sector and guiding back to profitability next year should be in the FT250. Hopefully our Christmas present there. |
Harry - I also take your point that we are now a CDMO (or perhaps we should use the term 'gun for hire' as a gangster equivalent) and therefore insulated to some extent from technical advances. |
I love it, leaves my 2nd biggest holding for my largest biggest holding. Come on Stuart, bring it home son! |
There are lots of novel and exciting genetic products in the pipeline. 20 years ago some of us thought OXB thought was the blockbuster. We now realise having an exciting development candidate still has many trial and regulatory as well as commercial hurdles to cross. In short, to get to where OXB are today is a very high barrier to entry. |
Was reading the news just now (it's raining) about Medera getting a NASDAQ listing via a merger with an existing listed company named Keen Vision.
What has this got to do with the price of fish?
Medera own Sardocor.
Regular readers will remember that at the end of March OXB put out this "guess the missing word" press release
Which included the quote "Furthermore, the Company has signed a new agreement with a US-based client specialising in cardiac gene therapy for the tech transfer, optimisation and manufacture of an adeno-associated virus-based process (AAV).".
It would have been quite difficult to guess who that was, unless you happened to spot the clue on slide 26 here
Anyway, anyone who is interested can look at the 3 links above and note that they intend to use their listing proceeds to accelerate three most advanced clinical programs for the adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based gene therapy candidates.
Personally I thought it was very interesting to see what they are up to and particularly wrt the one with 30+ million potential patients.
With the usual caveats here that before buying the party poppers it's best to wait for the trial results - AND - I'm assuming that in OXB's "secret squirrel" RNS code, technology transfer, process optimisation and manufacture means that they had issues with the original research AAV, have looked around for the best and have settled on inAAVate (see ) but it could also simply mean optimising their existing vector with OXB's I.P. and then manufacturing it for them.
Either way there is huge potential here if the trials work out. I'm not a doctor but I would guess it's a pretty quick readout to determine if you have fixed someone with heart failure or not. |
Ygor,
Short answer:- Yes.
Longer answer would risk me ending up in one of the new hurty words gulags, so I'll be as diplomatic as possible:-
If AZ wants a piece of the Chinese market then they need a Chinese partner if they want to try to avoid their execs periodically being arrested for spying, tax evasion, etc., until some concession was given. Note I used the word "try" there.
There is no I.P. protection in China (unless it suits them) and almost every technological company in the west has employed the highest calibre post-grad students who were "gathering pollen abroad to make honey at home". They usually only get caught / punished with US defence work as nobody else has the time / money for the counter security which in most other countries would only result in a slap on the wrist if it even went to trial anyway.
I'm sure you will have seen many western execs refer to the "boiling frog" analogy.
What do you do? Very difficult decision and a little bit of something from a potentially huge market is of course better than your fair share of nothing.
So their tech may or may not be better than T-Charge / whatever OXB developed. It may or may not be heavily influenced by western patents and more. Novartis (and more so BMS) seem happy to run many parallel routes to give them most chance of a success / most chance of something from every territory.
What happens if the US Biosecure act gets passed? What happens if China invades Taiwan?
I think the point to bear in mind is that OXB in France, USA and UK is geared up to make a lot of money in serving (what is likely near) 50 partners in territories where we can make a lot of money being a very specialist service provider, and without selling our soul in markets which the world's biggest companies find it difficult not to target.
Countering that of course is the news story some time ago now (found by Dom I seem to recall) of Wuxi reaching out to / visiting OXB. Who knows what happened with that? |
Customisable watchlists with full streaming quotes from leading exchanges, such as LSE, NASDAQ, NYSE, AMEX, Bovespa, BIT and more.
Hot Features
Premium
