That all sounds very reasonable and a capital raise makes sense considering their cash runway is less than a year out.
Here are a few additional thoughts to consider that may drag the company out of this free fall before any dilution.
1. Immunotherapy companies in general see a boost in share price during ASCO; this is a time for releasing major breakthroughs and simply being in the immune oncology space has its benefits.
2. Oncosec may indeed be presenting at ASCO. Accepted late-breaking abstracts are released after the start of the conference.
3. The company's market cap is somewhere close to cash on hand with zero debt. The market, therefore, has placed no value in its pipeline. How long is that going to last?
4. We now know that they have at least two TAP agreements in place. Even if the fee structure is negligible per agreement, the company is still seeing revenues. If they secure more agreements then those negligible fee revenues could add up and reduce the amount of dilutive funding. We still don't know how much they are charging and they may have secured more agreements. They aren't announcing every TAP agreement, just the first one.
5. They are radio silent on their preclinical development. Who knows what they have in the works in terms of gene combinations. The gene expression improvements provided by bicistronic constructs and tissue sensing gene delivery technology would theoretically amplify the interferon gamma signature in the tumor microenvironment. This would lead to improvements in the upregulation of PD-1 and PD-L1 phenotypes, thus setting the stage for better responses to checkpoint inhibitors like Opdivo and Pembrolizumab.
6. Patent applications are painting a possible pipeline picture where checkpoint inhibitors are encoded on plasmids with or separate from immune stimulatory agents. The implications for a product that contains DNA-encoded antibodies for use in immune oncology cannot be overstated.
