RE:RE:RE:RE:QuestionI shared Palinc2000's view that Katanna was a lottery ticket when they first bought it. It seemed to me that the chances of a small Montreal-based biotech winning big on an acquistion of an even smaller, pre-clincial Montreal-based biotech that the big boys seemingly had no interest in was not high. So, I enjoyed your explanation of how this deal may have been influenced by other factors as well. I still don't give it any value in how I model TH's valuation as it still remains too early to do so. But it is now getting pretty close to where you need to give it some value and it likely is fair to start giving it some value for the option on success it represents. I am going to guess the market is giving it US$1.50 or so in value right now for that option at this time. That seems roughly fair to me. But the good news is that option value can increase massively and quickly.
I know a lot of folks here like to take shots at Quebec and/or Canada from time to time when they are disappointed with the performance of the stock. It would be great to see something totally Quebec-based like TH-1902 blow up into something that is a game-changer for cancer treatment. It is always fun to see the underdog win. TH-1902 certainly has the potential to make the ending of how TH bought Katanna to be a very happy one. Let's hope it works out that way. From where I sit, that option value for TH-1902 is likely to increase pretty quickly in the months ahead. The anti Quebec/Canada bias may limit that value some but the science will still win the day.
Not being a scientist, I know my thoughts on such complicated and intricate matters are not worth a lot. That is why I so appreciate all the great scientific posters here. But my simplistic, non-scientific brain tells me that if TH-1902 has not harmed anyone yet, then we are already in a very good spot. I was more concerned that there would be a safety issue that would show up in humans than I was that the MOA would not work in humans. Having seemingly passed the early part of the safety test (since the trial is ongoing and the presenters sure seemedd confident on Monday) it really is now a question of whether the Sortilin receptor acts as it did in the mice. Again, I am not a scientist, but it seems to me that this is a lower barrier to success than establishing the safety of the drug in humans. Is that a reasonable way to think about it?
jfm1330 wrote: Kudos must be given to Christian Marsolais here. He is the remaining scientific guy in the company and he had background in cancer before joining Thera. Also, Dr. Beliveau is a mediatic "star" among top scientist in the province of Quebec. So everybody knows him. Also, his former students are a bit everywhere in the bioscience microcosme of the province. I also think that some former lab people that lost their jobs at Thera when they closed the labs 10 years ago ended up at UQAM.
As I said yesterday noting that John Huss was with Angiochem, it's a small world in Montreal in biosciences. In every biopharma company, there is somebody that knows somebody from another company and there are former UQAM students everywhere. But to me, the history of Thera with peptide drugs candidates is the key that led them to buy Katana, and to Katana selling to Thera. It was part of their field of expertise as a drug developper. I think it was a natural outcome. There was a company with a very innovative peptide drug candidate, and a company with expertise in developping peptide drug candidates, and there was Marsolais with the oncology background to be able to figure the whole thing out and see that there was a good fit there. Add to that the fact that the government of Quebec is financing companies like Thera and Katana in various ways, and the research behind all that was out of the academic world in Quebec and this is financed with public money through university. From the government point of view it was also a good marriage because it made sense economically for the province.
Wino115 wrote: That was a question in the KOL event and Marsolais emphatically stated their peptide does not cross BBB and Beliveau nodded along with him.
My recollection from reading some of the original Katana and Angiochem material was that the labs initial focus was finding a way to cross the BBB and designing drugs for that purpose. That is what Angiochem is doing. same team also discovered this peptide that latched to sort1. It didn't work for brain tumors, but they saw it could work for other solid tumors with high Sort1 and spun the tech out as Katana. When they were pitching it around the whole science behind sort1 was still very early. You can see from the dates of Beliveau articles on the website that it was truly groundbreaking science UQAM did. They beat the Gothenburg guys by years.I'm sure one of the reasons Katana took a year or more to find a partner was that it was so early and very little clinical work had been done around that idea. It fit well with an equally smallish company able to put $10mil down to see if it could advance in the lab. Kudos to THTX mgmt for taking that risk.
qwerty22 wrote:
Sortilin is best known as a brain protein, it's expressed on the surface of neurons. I would think one of the first things you look at is does it cross the BBB. If Katana/thtx haven't ticked this off the to do list early in the process then we are invested in fools. Could they have not done this? Are they all fools?
SABBOBCAT wrote: Wasn't Katana working on peptides to cross the blood bran barrier before selling the platform to TH? Is there any risk that the PDC would cross the BBB and have into tended side effects?