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). |
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. |
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 |
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! |
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%.
Keep up to date with WealthOracle AM |
Out for a nice profit, must have been a big seller in the mkt.. |
Having a small nibble here on each big drop, will dump if goes back to 2. |
What is happening here after their recent sale and a valuation of more than 220p? |
Battered, good entry point, or wait.. |
 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 |
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. |
thanks SEV22 |
Achilles Therapeutics Added to the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index.
LONDON, Dec. 20, 2021 -- Achilles Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: ACHL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing precision T cell therapies to treat solid tumors, today announced that the Company has been added to the NASDAQ Biotech Index (Nasdaq: NBI), effective prior to market open today, Monday, December 20, 2021.
The NASDAQ Biotechnology Index is designed to track the performance of a set of securities listed on The Nasdaq Stock Market® (Nasdaq®) that are classified as either biotechnology or pharmaceutical according to the Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB). The NASDAQ Biotechnology Index is calculated under a modified capitalization-weighted methodology. Companies in the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index must meet eligibility requirements, including minimum market capitalization, average daily trading volume and seasoning as a public company, among other criteria. NASDAQ selects constituents once annually in December. |
Published today:
Achilles Therapeutics Presents Positive Data at ESMO I-O Congress 2021 on High-Dose Manufacturing Process for Precision T Cell Therapies Targeting Clonal Neoantigens.
Over 10-fold dose increase at GMP scale with VELOS™ Process 2 manufacturing.
cNeT maintain CD4+ and CD8+ T cell subsets with a highly potent polyclonal phenotype.
Dosing of patients with high-dose cNeT expected in 1H 2022.
LONDON, Dec. 09, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Achilles Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: ACHL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing precision T cell therapies to treat solid tumors, today presented positive data at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress 2021 (ESMO I-O) that further demonstrate that Achilles’ VELOS™ Process 2 manufacturing increases clonal neoantigen-reactive T cell (cNeT) doses by more than 10-fold over Process 1 at GMP scale and maintains a highly potent polyclonal phenotype. These data add to the pilot scale proof-of-concept study recently reported at the 2021 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting.
“We are extremely pleased to have demonstrated the ability to generate a significant boost in cNeT dose over Process 1 in clinical-scale runs and to have successfully completed the technology transfer of Process 2 into clinical manufacture,” said Dr Ed Samuel, SVP Technical Operations of Achilles. “These Process 2 GMP data validate our previously reported R&D data and confirm retention of critical phenotypic characteristics and the ability to identify the active drug component of our products without adding to end-to-end manufacturing time. We anticipate dosing patients with high-dose Process 2 cNeT in the first half of 2022, with 6-week clinical and translational science data available in the second half 2022.”
Key highlights from the presentation entitled “Achilles VELOS Process 2 generates a >10-fold improvement in cNeT dose over Process 1 with a highly potent polyclonal phenotype and has been successfully validated at GMP scale for clinical use in solid cancer,” include:
Reporting that GMP validation of VELOS Process 2 has successfully been completed and transferred into clinical manufacture in Achilles’ ongoing Phase I/IIa CHIRON and THETIS clinical trials.
Showing that VELOS Process 2 generates a cell product that retains both CD4+ and CD8+ T cell subsets and maintains polyclonal cNeT reactivity with a favorable cell fitness phenotype.
Demonstrating the quantification of the active cNeT drug component with Achilles’ proprietary potency assay which further underlines the strength of the Achilles platform.
About Achilles Therapeutics
Achilles is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing precision T cell therapies targeting clonal neoantigens: protein markers unique to the individual that are expressed on the surface of every cancer cell. The Company has two ongoing Phase I/IIa trials, the CHIRON trial in patients with unresectable locally advanced and metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the THETIS trial in patients with recurrent or metastatic melanoma. Achilles uses DNA sequencing data from each patient, together with its proprietary PELEUS™ bioinformatics platform, to identify clonal neoantigens specific to that patient, and then develop precision T cell-based product candidates specifically targeting those clonal neoantigens. |
What happened here, rose for no reason, then plummeted. |
The Syncona Investment Trust, a member of Interactive Investor’s ACE 40 rated list of ethical investments, has reported its latest half-yearly results (11th November 2021):
Syncona Ord (SYNC) investment trust, which invests in life science companies, reported a decline in net asset value of 11.4% for the first six months of its financial year – from the end of March to the end of September.
Over this period, the trust reported that its net assets sat at £1.15 billion, down from £1.3 billion at the end of March 2021.
Figures from FE Analytics show that over this period its share price total return was a loss of 33.6%, suffering from its high premium notably declining.
The decline, the report notes, was driven predominantly by the decline in the share price of two of the trust’s listed holdings, Freeline Therapeutics Holdings ADR FRLN
and Achilles Therapeutics ADR ACHL.
Freeline’s poor performance is put down to “operational challenges” owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. Syncona says these concerns have now been addressed.
Achilles’ share price decline was driven by “market sentiment towards cell and gene therapies”. Syncona says that it believes the business is performing well and in line with expectations.
The trust’s strategy is to establish, build and fund companies to turn exceptional science into a dynamic portfolio of global leaders in life sciences. The aim is for the companies to deliver their product to market. The trust has a long-term target of owning between 15 and 20 companies. It currently has 10.
Martin Murphy, chief executive of Syncona Investment Management Limited, said: “While we are disappointed by the decline in NAV during the period, we are continuing to build a diverse portfolio across the development cycle and therapeutic areas and remain confident in our companies' potential. The substantial capital that a number of our companies have accessed so far this year validate the significant opportunity ahead for them.”
The trust also said that it planned to deploy another £100 million to £175 million into both existing companies and new opportunities this year.
Murphy said: “With clinical data the key driver of value and risk for Syncona, we believe our companies are well positioned and on track to further validate our model and strategy in the next 12 months with the potential for a rich seam of data.”
The trust is a member of Interactive Investor’s ACE 40 rated list of ethical investments. It was placed under formal review in the summer due to the volatility of its share price, but it kept its place on the list.
Dzmitry Lipski, head of funds research at Interactive Investor, notes: “We remain positive on the trust outlook and see it as a strong choice for adventurous investors prepared to tolerate high volatility in the short term, but potentially reap rewards over the longer term. |
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