Over the last week I've been reading up on small biotech firm Immupharma with a view to investing. Phase III trials are underway on a Lupus treatment.
The peptide discoverer involved is a Professor Muller and watching some of her video presentations I have to say she is very impressive, and certainly a credible cheerleader for the treatment.
But it was when looking over the management things started to look less promising. They don't fill me with confidence. Having trawled through many of their announcements over the years I'm disappointed to find that many have proved to be of low quality - I started to pull together a chronology from 2009 (work in progress below), with links. Promises of progress, impending big pharma partnerships which failed to materialise and bagged funding commitments proved repeatedly to be specious. I'm now at the point of not being convinced they are capable of delivering on that front alone.
As regards the science I have spent some time working through a PI analysis appearing here that makes a very exciting case for investing. It's quoting an ADVFN BB post by a follower of the company who has put in a lot of work compiling sources and providing links. But two days after starting attempting to evaluate some of the statements found there I over-turned my initial enthusiasm and found myself considering the opposite case. My comment is at the foot of that website page but I'll make my (slightly re-edited) concerns available here for anyone who might be interested, although they may be fairly opaque without reading the pro-Immupharma post first, at the initial microblog link.
Q's
1. Black / African-American have the highest risk of lupus, yet perversely in the phase IIb trial “All patients were white and the majority of patients (64%) were Hispanic.”
2. In the phase IIb study “Baseline characteristics of the groups were generally well balanced, except for the mean level of anti-bodies to dsDNA, which were lower in group 3 (75.2 IU/ml)than either groups 1 (132.9) or 2 (120.0).” Group 3 was the placebo group. Although unfortunate to have such a key imbalance but perhaps could be viewed positively - link.
3. I am not convinced that there would have been a disproportionately beneficial effect on placebo responders above those in the drug recipient groups upon early release of a company RNS. As the 24 week data…
