Biotech Values

[mcbio]

CLLS -

I am a little worried that I sound like a broken record, but I would suggest that, broadly, the risk to CLLS strategy is that their response rate and/or mortality rate will get substantively worse when they roll it out more broadly (i.e. to more trial centers, and even more patients within the same centers - so less time/care with each patient). I don't track CLLS routinely, but for example @BiotechBbqBeats notes after the first 2 pts, they have only 2 of 5 patients getting to MRD negative. And another way to think about this is to compare these early results to the first data from auto CAR-T.

More narrowly, again as I've noted before, the problem that CLLS hates to acknowledge is that they need to lympho-deplete MUCH more heavily than auto CAR-T. That means much more expense and likely higher mortality in order to get the same response. But I wouldn't expect this to really show up until they start rolling out to a lot of trial centers.

Finally, FWIW, I think they are really more of a competitor to BLCM than JUNO/KITE because, like BLCM, they require the lympho-depletion.

Notwithstanding the CAR-T caveats, I'm still sticking around for now to see what becomes of the ag business. That is a whole other side to the company that @BiotechBbqBeats and others either are completely unaware of or, for some reason, seem to completely ignore. I think there is value in that part of the business and I want to at least stick around to see how that gets monetized. There are also the broad issued patents and nice cash hoard.