Gulf starts at Sheikh Adi-2 25/05/2012
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ImmuPharma bullish after £2.5m loss
Drug discoverer ImmuPharma (IMM) lost £2.5 million last year, but suggests a bid for US development partner Cephalon could provide unexpected opportunities. The London-based company, whose president Dr. Robert Zimmer holds a key stake, had made £9.1 million pre-tax in 2009, thanks to a hefty milestone payment for its Lupozor lupus treatment from Cephalon, which was not repeated in 2010, but still ended the year with £15.6 million cash.
Now that another US group Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a generic drug specialist, has launched a £3.6 billion hostile bid for Cephalon, Dimitri Dimitriou, ImmuPharma's chief executive officer, claims to detect a lucrative potential opportunity. He argues that, since a branded treatment for lupus, a group of diseases affecting the auto-immune system, would not fit in with Valeant's business model, if it acquires Cephalon, ImmuPharma would be well placed to recover sole ownership of Lupuzor and licence it out to another partner.
That partner would presumably pay its own milestone payments, in Dimitriou's words offering 'a second bite of the cherry' and enabling ImuPharma 'to sell Lupuzor twice'. Whether or not this rosy scenario comes about, he stresses the company has also obtained 'early encouraging results' from Phase 1/11a trials in France for another product, its IPP204106 anti-cancer compound.
Noting that one trial patient testing the compound 'has survived for 10 months after other treatments failed', Dimitriou reports interest from several major drug companies. However, he says he prefers to await the outcome of Phase 11b trials for patients with brain tumours, hormone-resistant prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer starting later this year, which he hopes will strengthen ImmuPharma's negotiating hand.
ImmuPharma shares surged from below 60p to more than 140p in 2009 on the Lupuzor/Cephalon deal, but have since slipped to 71p, 15p below where Dimitriou and chairman Richard Warr sold big chunks of their own holdings in 2009 to enable institutional investor M & G to take a significant stake. They have speculative growth potential.
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