Syncona Share Discussion Threads

[rambutan2] 16/6/2022 16:06

Finals out, all in all, quite good: The second half of CY2021 was marked by significant volatility across equity markets globally. This uncertainty has carried on into 2022, compounded by concerns around inflation, interest rates and Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing humanitarian crisis. This has impacted investor sentiment towards risk assets. We have seen a macro rotation away from growth stocks, impacting both valuations and financings of biotech companies, especially smaller, earlier stage companies. As market volatility has increased, the Syncona team continues to carefully review the requirements of each of our portfolio companies and our capital pool to ensure that our Company is well positioned to navigate continuing challenging markets. Our balance sheet provides us with a strategic advantage, and the team's expertise and rigorous approach to risk management means we continue to take a disciplined approach to capital allocation across a well-funded portfolio and exciting pipeline. Syncona ended the year with net assets of GBP1,309.8 million or 194.4p per share, a 0.3 per cent return in the year (31 March 2021: net assets of GBP1,300.3 million, NAV per share of 193.9p, 4.4 per cent return), despite the wider market backdrop for life science companies, which saw the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index decline 12 per cent during the period. The significant NAV uplift achieved through the sale of Gyroscope to Novartis and multiple successful private financings offset the decline in share prices of our three listed companies, Autolus, Freeline and Achilles. We recognise that the performance of these listed companies has been disappointing for our shareholders. Our team have worked closely with portfolio company management teams to support them as they continue to execute their development plans. Similarly, the challenging market conditions have also impacted Syncona's share price performance in the financial year, which has been disappointing. Whilst the market environment for early stage biotech companies continues to be challenging, our listed companies are funded to deliver clinical data which represent key milestones for their businesses, and we believe Syncona is well positioned to deliver growth over the long term. https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/london/syncona-SYNC/share-news/Syncona-Limited-Final-Results/88377324

[chc15] 06/6/2022 09:39

Nice rise, must be a big buyer in mkt..

[rambutan2] 28/4/2022 20:24

And to balance things out: Syncona Ltd, a leading healthcare company focused on founding, building and funding global leaders in life science, today announces that it has committed GBP15 million in an oversubscribed GBP75.5 million Series B financing in OMass Therapeutics ("OMass"), a biotechnology company that identifies medicines against highly validated target ecosystems. Syncona was a co-investor in this financing round, which was led by new investors GV, Northpond and Sanofi Ventures. Existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises and Oxford University also joined the round. OMass, an Oxford University spin out, is developing small molecule drugs to treat rare diseases and immunological conditions. The company has a unique approach to the way it finds new medicines. It uses its proprietary drug discovery platform, OdyssION(TM), to more accurately interrogate the target and how it interacts with its native ecosystem. These observations provide potentially critical information that can increase the chances of finding highly effective small molecule medicines that will be successful in clinical trials. This latest financing brings the total amount that OMass has raised to GBP119 million. These proceeds will be used to advance OMass' small molecule portfolio towards clinical trials. This includes progressing the development of small molecule drugs to treat Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, Inflammatory Bowel Disease and other inflammatory and rare diseases. Following the Series B financing, Syncona has revalued its existing investment which has resulted in a 32% uplift in the value of its stake in OMass. Including the drawdown of the first tranche of Syncona's Series B investment of GBP15 million, Syncona's holding value of OMass is now GBP44 million. On drawdown of the full Series B financing, Syncona's ownership stake in OMass will be 31 per cent. Edward Hodgkin, Chair of OMass and Partner at Syncona said: "We are pleased with this financing round which will support OMass as it looks to progress its pipeline of small molecule drugs. The strength of this global group of top tier life science investors reflects confidence in the company's technology and supports our ambition to build a sustainable therapeutics business that has the potential to develop novel drugs in areas of high unmet medical need . This financing represents a further validation of the ability of Syncona's portfolio companies to attract high quality syndicates, to fund them over the long-term." https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/london/syncona-SYNC/share-news/Syncona-Limited-Syncona-invests-in-GBP75-5-million/87933959

[rambutan2] 28/4/2022 20:22

Noted, from endpt.com today: Last Friday, SwanBio Therapeutics laid off about one-quarter of its 60-person workforce, a person with knowledge of the matter told Endpoints News. The gene therapy biotech was unable to secure an additional round of financing in the first quarter after investors backed out of the round, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. It’s been 24 months since the Philadelphia-area biotech disclosed it had expanded its Series A to bring total financing to $77 million. So, like dozens of other biotechs in recent months, SwanBio convened a hybrid meeting on April 22 to let the affected employees know. Just three days prior, the startup said it would be the first to test an AAV gene therapy for patients with adrenomyeloneuropathy. A Phase I/II clinical trial is slated for the second half of this year, the biotech said April 19. The investigational therapy, dubbed SBT101, has received fast track and orphan drug designations from the FDA in recent months. A SwanBio spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs and financing, noting as a private company, the biotech is "intentional about how and when we disclose information."

[chc15] 19/4/2022 18:21

Another shocking day, i wonder how much money Sarsin and Waverton are losing here for their clients. I topped up today, but will be dumping on any profit..

[chc15] 08/4/2022 12:31

Had a small nibble here again, think it's been battered too much, we'll see.

[tiger blue] 05/4/2022 10:00

Bought some more this morning after Martin Murphy's purchase, which I see as quite significant. Sentiment has been horrible in biotech generally and SYNC, but the shares are demonstrably cheap given the discount to nav, which is not a comment one could have made during their previous range, as nav was never much above 225p even when the shares traded at 300p. There was a lot of hope and expectation built in then, now pessimism rules, so time to buy. Share trading volume has been picking up recently and Waverton and Sarasin appearing on the register is encouraging.

[1seanshare] 31/3/2022 11:47

Seems very strange - what is causing the downward pressure?

[chc15] 31/3/2022 11:16

Back to 2017 levels here, what's going on, tempted to buy and dump again.

[markr5] 09/3/2022 16:58

09/03/22 Robert Hutchinson (Non-Exec director) has just purchased 26000 shares @ £1.71 p/s 04/03/22 Sarasin & Partners have increased their holding from 5% to 6%

[markr5] 02/3/2022 18:30

Hi Tiger Blue, thank you very much for the info. I'll take a look at BB Healthcare and SONG soon. I have considered Caledonia, but i seem more inclined towards RIT Capital (RCP) if i had to choose right now, out of the two that i narrowed it down to, within the AIC 'Flexible' sector. That said, there doesn't seem much to choose between them; they have both performed very well indeed over the long term, and appear well balanced. I'm taking a look at HarbourVest Global Equity (HVPE) and NB Private Equity partners (NBPE) at present, in case the market takes another big tumble/continues on down for a while.

[tiger blue] 02/3/2022 17:17

Hi markr5, PE sector not my strong point, I have long term position in Caledonia but they only have PE alongside quoted stuff. I am primarily interested in inflation protection and inflation linked income and biggest holdings are in the CG Asset Mgmt Funds, Greencoat UK Wind, Smithson and BB Healthcare. I think healthcare is a great long term sector, BB traditionally trades at a small premium but currently 5% discount, the managers are excellent and their monthly factsheet has a great commentary - they were my go to for sensible views on Covid during the height of that. Only recent contrarian purchase was Hipgnosis Songs (SONG) which has gone to a nice discount and 5% yield after the Neil Young/Spotify spat, which actually increased his streaming elsewhere. Ongoing attempts to increase writers share of the pot would also help them if successful.

[markr5] 02/3/2022 16:05

Hi Tiger Blue, it looks like we may have bought at just the right time! Perhaps it was Peel Hunt (Thanks for this info) highlighting the discount that helped today's share price increase. It is reassuring to know that you have met with the company several times. I'm only a small private investor, and still learning, but I am drawn to the contrarian approach, in general.It's great to have some experienced company. Are there any others that are out of favour that you are considering at present? Although it appears to be a contradiction to the contrarian approach, I am contemplating researching the Private equity sector Investment trusts next, as i think they will continue to do well into the future (I'm looking for some long-term buy and holds for my SIPP).

[tiger blue] 02/3/2022 12:00

Thanks markr5, good to have some company on board. Peel Hunt have also highlighted the discount according to Citywire last night. I met the company about a dozen times when I was a broker (now retired) from when it launched originally as BACIT at 100p, so knew them very well. It usually pays long term unless you're buying duds to get involved when things are out of favour, after all if everyone is bullish there's no one left to convince! Fund managers usually also follow the herd, however much they like to state otherwise. Off topic but I remember two meetings with the venerable Bruce Stout who runs Murray International Trust. At the first the trust was trading expensively on a premium and we had over 20 people round the table. At the second we could only muster 3 people which was embarrassing, and the trust was on a big discount. That turned out to be very close to the low point, and there was a double uplift from the asset value rising and the discount narrowing.

[markr5] 01/3/2022 16:31

I've just bought in too as i consider this is good value and may be turning a corner. The chart does not say it will do though! If it breaks 160 then it may fall to 130. I've taken a risk though, as like you say Tiger Blue, it's not easy buying anything at the moment. Thank you for your post and your NAV assessment. It was very helpful

[tiger blue] 01/3/2022 13:29

Back in today at 167.5, having sold out of my remaining shares at 225 when the Gyroscope NASDAQ float was pulled. Since then Gyroscope has of course been sold but the share price has still tanked. I have recalculated nav based on the quoted movements since the last valuation date (dec 31), and make it c. 192.4p. SYNC has traded at a premium to nav in excess of 40% in the past. That looked frothy but I do feel that given their ability to create value the shares now look cheap on a discount of 12%. Autolus/Freeline/Achilles have all been grim on NASDAQ but the trio now only represent less than 7.5% of the nav so cannot do much more damage, and one or more could possibly spring a surprise. One big unknown is the future milestone payments due from Gyroscope, which may be up to £249.4 million, but which are discounted for risk/time etc by Syncona to a current value of £47.5m, which looks a conservative approach. Hard buying anything in these markets, but you have to dip a toe in sometimes!

[km18] 16/2/2022 11:59

Syncona Ltd is a closed-ended investment healthcare company which focuses on investing in and building global leaders in life science. The Company operates in two segments: life science portfolio and fund investments. The Company’s portfolio is made up of a small group of healthcare companies. The Company intends to achieve the investment objective through investments in long-only funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, infrastructure funds, credit and fixed income and real estate funds. These plausible investment initiatives were effectively incorporated into the firm’s Net Asset value, which in turn grew by 16% from £1,552.8m to £1,339.7m. Subsequently, the Life science portfolio is currently valued at £843.2 million higher than the £617.9 million derived in 2020, hence yielding a return on investment of 29.5%. https://wealthoracle.co.uk/detailed-result Keep up to date with WealthOracle AM

[chc15] 01/2/2022 14:55

Out for a nice profit, must have been a big seller in the mkt..

[chc15] 27/1/2022 10:07

Having a small nibble here on each big drop, will dump if goes back to 2.

[bbonsall] 25/1/2022 17:15

What is happening here after their recent sale and a valuation of more than 220p?

[chc15] 24/1/2022 10:26

Battered, good entry point, or wait..

[robow] 06/1/2022 14:21

tipped in The Telegraph today as their Investment Trust of the year Questor: this trust just sold a holding for £600m – and its entire market value is only £1.4bn Questor investment trust bargain: it’s not the first big success for Syncona, the life sciences incubator, and we expect plenty more to come By Richard Evans 6 January 2022 • 6:00am On Wednesday we chose a healthcare company as our stock tip of the year, on the basis not only of our expectations of its own recovery but because of investors’ recent aversion to the sector as a whole. We will double down on that belief today and pick our investment trust of the year from the same arena. Our choice, Syncona, is an unusual beast: it invests in young life sciences companies with a view to holding them through the various stages of drug discovery, clinical trials, commercialisation and perhaps an eventual stock market listing. This is not the first time we have tipped the trust; we first did so in 2018 and have reiterated the advice since. Some readers will not thank us as the shares have lost 22.7pc since that first tip. Why then are we backing the fund again? Simply because we think the market fails to see its potential or perhaps does not have the patience to wait for that potential to become apparent in actual profits. As we said on Wednesday, generating returns from the scientific breakthroughs at which the healthcare sector excels takes time, while many investors have made fortunes over the past couple of years from spotting the immediate bounty on offer from Covid winners such as Microsoft. Syncona’s portfolio currently consists of 12 companies and it aims to increase that number to between 15 and 20. Several can offer concrete evidence of progress: collectively 12 of their treatments are undergoing clinical trials and three have already floated on the stock market. Of four companies no longer in the portfolio, two, Blue Earth and Nightstar, were sold for impressive gains of 9.9 and 4.5 times the amount invested respectively, while the other two proved unviable and were wound up. A 50pc success rate is good when you are seeking to build businesses from nothing in a sector that teems with scientific, regulatory and commercial risks. But it is the fund’s most recent deal that cements our belief that its managers are equal to the challenge and can be expected to produce a regular stream of lucrative winners. Just before Christmas Syncona announced that it had agreed to sell its 48.5pc stake in one of its holdings, Gyroscope Therapeutics, which makes gene therapies for blindness, for up to £589m. The fund had co-founded Gyroscope in 2016 and funded it since but the really striking thing is how that £589m figure, admittedly the maximum proceeds, compares with the value that the market currently ascribes to the entire trust: just £1.4bn. Investors seem to be expressing scepticism that any other holdings, current or future, will generate returns along the lines of those achieved by Gyroscope. In view of that 50pc success rate on investments already exited, such a view seems very pessimistic to this column. Or perhaps the market was spooked by what seemed, before this deal emerged, to be a lofty premium on the fund of 29pc, or a sky-high 69pc implied on the unquoted part of the portfolio. Gyroscope’s sale brings the overall premium down to 7.3pc and that on the unquoted part to 26pc, according to calculations carried out by JP Morgan Cazenove, the broker, on the day the deal was announced. Questor’s view is simple: the sales of Gyroscope, Blue Earth and Nightstar, along with the flotations of other holdings such as Autolus, show that this fund knows its business. We therefore expect similar success stories in future and the generation of returns that will comfortably exceed its current market value. The only proviso is that it won’t happen overnight and so readers will have to show more patience than perhaps with other Questor tips. As we have said before, it’s one to buy and tuck away. Questor says: buy Ticker: SYNC

[sev22] 06/1/2022 14:13

Freeline Announces FDA Clearance of Investigational New Drug Application for FLT201 for Gaucher Disease Type 1: FLT201 is the first AAV gene therapy program to enter the clinic for Gaucher disease Type 1. FLT201 Phase 1/2 trial for Gaucher disease Type 1 on track for patient dosing in the first half of 2022. LONDON, January 6, 2022 – Freeline Therapeutics Holdings plc (Nasdaq: FRLN) (the “Company”; or “Freeline̶1;), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing transformative AAV-mediated gene therapies for patients suffering from inherited systemic debilitating diseases, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its Investigational New Drug (IND) application for FLT201 as an investigational gene therapy for the treatment of Gaucher disease Type 1. “The FDA clearance of this IND is an important milestone for FLT201, which is the first AAV-mediated gene therapy for patients with Gaucher disease Type 1 in the clinic,” said Michael Parini, Chief Executive Officer of Freeline. “Our FLT201 program harnesses our unique scientific platform capabilities – our highly potent, proprietary AAVS3 capsid, robust CMC and pre-clinical data across all our programs, and our advanced protein engineering capabilities – to develop a potentially transformative treatment for patients suffering from Gaucher disease. The entry of our third program into the clinic is important validation of the advantage of Freeline’s portfolio approach to development.” “This IND clearance is an important step toward bringing FLT201 to patients and is made possible by the extended safety database across our proprietary platform,” said Dr. Pamela Foulds, Chief Medical Officer of Freeline. “Our extensive preclinical proof-of-concept studies suggest FLT201 has the potential to reach difficult to treat tissues, such as bone marrow and lung, which are not sufficiently addressed by standard-of-care enzyme replacement therapy. These data, along with the promise of sustained, endogenous production of GCase following a one-time intravenous infusion, suggest that treatment with FLT201 may be a transformative treatment that can significantly reduce or eliminate the need for enzyme or substrate replacement therapy.” FLT201 consists of a potent, rationally designed AAV capsid (AAVS3) containing an expression cassette that encodes for a novel glucocerebrosidase variant (GCasevar85) under the control of a liver-specific promoter. The GCasevar85 contains two novel amino acid substitutions to the wild-type human GCase, which results in a 20-fold increase in GCase half-life at lysosomal pH conditions, but similar catalytic parameters to those of wild-type GCase and enzyme replacement therapy (ERT). Freeline initiated the Phase 1/2 dose-finding trial of FLT201 at the end of 2021 in Europe and expects to dose two patients in the first dose cohort in the first half of 2022, with initial safety and biomarker data from the first cohort expected in Q3 2022. The Company expects to report data on all dosed patients, including those dosed in Q3, prior to year-end 2022. About Freeline Therapeutics Freeline is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing transformative adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector-mediated systemic gene therapies. The Company is dedicated to improving patient lives through innovative, one-time treatments that provide functional cures for inherited systemic debilitating diseases. Freeline uses its proprietary, rationally designed AAV vector, along with novel promoters and transgenes, to deliver a functional copy of a therapeutic gene into human liver cells, thereby expressing a persistent functional level of the missing or dysfunctional protein into the patient’s bloodstream. The Company’s integrated gene therapy platform includes in-house capabilities in research, clinical development, manufacturing, and commercialization. The Company has clinical programs in hemophilia B, Fabry disease, and Gaucher disease Type 1. Freeline is headquartered in the UK and has operations in Germany and the US. About Gaucher Disease Gaucher disease is a genetic disorder in which a fatty substance called glucosylceramide accumulates in macrophages in certain organs due to the lack of functional glucocerebrosidase (GCase). The disorder is hereditary and presents in various subtypes. Freeline is currently focused on Gaucher disease Type 1, the most common type, which impacts the health of many organs of the body including the spleen, liver, blood system and bones. The current standard of care is intravenous infusion of ERT every two weeks, which is a significant treatment burden on the patient.