RE:RE:RE:Denali-Takeda Yeah, I remember the Vaccinex deal, regardless. There has never been any evidence that Bioasis got any money from that deal. The press release announcing the agreement (
found here) stated that Bioasis "could receive up to $US 20 million in the form of upfront and milestone payments, and annual single-digit royalty payments upon commercialization."
Bioasis has never issued an update about the status of that program. Clearly, there have been no upfront or milestone payments or we would have seen the revenue in the Bioasis financial reports.
In the Denali/Takeda announcement (
found here and a Fierce Biotech article
found here) it's clear that Denali gets $150 million up front - before any work gets done, just for signing. In the Bioasis/Vaccinex agreement there were no such payments. The Denali/Takeda deal announces indicates further payments of $90 million upon IND milestones. The financial terms of other milestones and options are not revealed in the press release.
The Denali/Takeda announcement does not indicate what each of the companies brings to the table, although with the size of the upfront payments, it looks like Denali is bringing everything to the deal. In other words, the agreement does not look like a licensing deal. It's called an "option and collaboration agreement" in the press release. A licensing agreement would be where a company like Takeda brought a therapeutic into the deal and a company like Denali would bring the means of transport across the BBB to the deal. As such, I don't think we could expect the upfront payments to be as high as the upfront payments in the Denali/Takeda deal.
If Bioasis were to enter such an agreement with a pharma, it would look like a partnership where the pharma pays Bioasis for a percentage of up to 100% of the rights to one or more Bioasis drugs like xB3=001, xB3-002,
xB3-007 or some other future development program.
I think this is the second time that Denali has set valuation benchmarks that may relate to Bioasis at some point. The Denali IPO created a market cap for Denali of over $2 billion CDN. In a previous post (
found here) I had calculated that such a valuation would translate into $42 CDN per Bioasis share, using the current number of outstanding Bioasis shares. Now there appears to be a signal from this Denali/Takeda deal that partnership programs are worth a lot of money, both upfront and overall. And that's the business that Bioasis is in.
Of course, there are no guarantees for Bioasis investors. The science has to continue to succeed and Bioasis has to execute sound business plans before even modest dreams can come true.
Nevertheless, we do operate in a market that is becoming increasingly defined. The question for investors is whether $0.70 or $42.00 represents that definition.
jdstox