IMV Inc IMVIF

RE:RE:Highlights from a recent meeting

[alphaseeking001]

They are certainly well aware of the fact that the financing made most current shareholders pretty upset and they had anticipated this.  What they made clear however, and I don't feel after the discussion that it's entirely an excuse, is that the financing environment in the US in particular for a small, relatively unknown biotech (of which there are 100s down there) is challenging to say the least.  In there last two financings in Canada they effectively brought in no new investors... all the stock was bought up by funds already invested in IMV or with long-term current shareholders.  They really needed NEW investors.  About half of the investment in the new financing is to new US-based investors, so they are happy about that.  They did show the same comparison sheet I'd seen before for recent small biotech financings in the US and although our discount was steep... it's not out of line.  They really wanted to go with a large US house as well and in particular they wanted a biotech analyst who is one of the big guns in biotech... which the Wells Fargo fellow is.  They have an agreement with them that he will initiate coverage within 3 months.

But, the big factors here are the fact that they were now within a 6 month window of needing money AND more importantly, the Incyte drug's failure really did set them back off their original timeline and plans.  As I noted in the previous posts, they were now in a situation where they had to prove that the benefits they saw in the previous studies were really due to DPX-Survivac and not at all to Incytes drug.  Although this is almost certainly the case... the data has to be clean... and they have to HAVE that data.  As pointed to in this week's prelim dataset... they feel they will have that data in June most likely... but that was too long to wait for a financing... too risky.  

They basically did more than hint that they had already had serious discussions with Incyte about doing a deal with them of some kind before we confirmed their drug (epacadostat) was a dud.  Hence the change in timeline.  In the end, we may well be even better off with monotherapy fast track status and hopefully additive effect with Keytruda but it definitely threw a wrench into the initial plans.  Hence the perceived imperitive to get a financing squared away with funding now through all potential clinical milestones, including all of the basket trial, well into 2020.  They said that Merck already thinks it's likely that it was DPX-Survivac that was having all the clinical effects seen so far... so that's great.  They need to prove it... hopefully that's what's coming at ASCO.