Question-and-Answer Session
Unidentified Audience Member
[Question Inaudible]
Jeff Morhet
The question for the folks that might not be able to hear it, that are listening to the webcast, the opportunity to act as a patent extension or life-cycle management tool for the intellectual property of an existing patent portfolio or molecule, and the answer is yes, we believe so. Not only do we believe so, but that is a strategy we're pursuing over time and it's also a strategy that we've already begun to pursue with our partner and others to be able to build new molecules.
Unidentified Audience Member
[Question Inaudible]
Jeff Morhet
So the question is, what is the ideal time or position for Innexus to detach itself from a program and you know, the classic scenario is to get to a 2A, and we're pursuing that. If you look at the current state of antibodies right now, you'd say phase 1 and a phase 2 or so, quite manageable, still show a cost profile which is quite doable for a small company. What you're seeing is Phase I or a single center, you're seeing a collapse depending on the data into a Phase I/II which is really keep a single center to finish it out, but then head on to additional centers around that. When you do get into Phase II, I've seen just recently saw Phase II creep up there and that surprised me quite a bit, I think the target they were looking at was 42,000,000 that's a significantly large Phase II. So depending on the target and the antibody it's still Phase II is our target, we don't anticipate that we want to take on those kinds of expenses right, in this early stage of the company, but ideally it's a spot for us to hand away the products and that's to the fact that not just because you're coming to the hockey-stick of cost in a Phase II or Phase III.
But also, the would-be risk of the program by the amount of data you’ve accumulated, and you’ve also increased the value, so, right now, pre-clinical: you've seen that moving upstream, pharmaceutical companies wanting to get involved in earlier-stage programs.
As a matter of fact, I just saw a biotech enter into a risk-sharing agreement; a very interesting structure with Merke GA and it represented a similar model of essentially $10-20 million upfront payment, and a deal structure anywhere from $30-75 million in milestone subpoena that was negotiated for the royalty structure but this most recent structure was much larger than that. As a matter of fact, you could have a zero after that, and it was a risk-sharing program, so again, we’ve seen an indication of pharmaceutical companies rapidly moving upstream to acquire these promising programs. They’re looking for a risk profile. They’re looking for particular data and, for us right now, we want to be able to deliver that data as soon as possible. Do we entertain earlier than that? Most certainly! We’ve entertained much early in the pre-clinical cycle for royalty sales, again, for a smart novel way for an early-stage company to acquire capital to develop programs.
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