Turtle, I've looked into NEOL and CDTP a bit and here are a few comments.
I'd stay away from CDTP. Their earlier approach, as you know, was to treat patients with coronary disease who are not candidates for stents or surgery with intravascular FGF4 via an adenovirus vector. Now, I'm not a fan of systemic adenovirus but their dose and a catheter route of administration should enable mostly local delivery. My problem with the company is the trial design. It was mind-numbingly stupid to enroll patients with ETTs < 10 minutes in a neovascularization strategy trial, as they apparently did. This will include a lot of fairly healthy people and if the patients are in pretty good shape to start, no therapy would make them better, hence the trial wasn't successful, even if the drug would work (which we don't know). Accordingly, they made an obvious mistake that no one who audited Clinical Trials 101 would have made, so I would have no confidence in the leadership or their advisors, so I wouldn't trust them to develop properly the cooling technology they're looking at now.
NEOL, on the other hand, looks sort of interesting for their IL-13 toxin conjugate for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The scientific principle is sound and they're approaching their phase 3 study with a well-considered approach. The treatment seems to about double the survival after surgery to 50 weeks from 22 weeks. Their target market will be neurosurgeons or interventional neuroradiologists, a small group who would be readily approachable. There are about 4 new cases of GBM per 100,000 population per year, so let's estimate 10,000 treatable new cases annually in the USA. $$/QALY considerations will probably tolerate a drug price of $30,000 per patient, so that's $300 Million sales annually in 4 years, probably $60 Million earnings. The market cap now is $200 Million, so considering a reasonable discount back to the present, the risk and a reasonable P/E, I'd say we'd be looking at a 2-3 bagger from current prices, in about 2 - 3 years' time. Perhaps a bit more if one were to consider Europe, Japan and ROW.
I'll send you an e-mail from one of my functioning addresses. I canceled my Yahoo account and don't use Yahoo anymore. I can't trust any company stupid enough to screw up so badly the most popular stock message boards in the world.
RE42 |
