NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[hyperopia]

thermoo, it was very encouraging to hear that a settlement was reached with Cognate in May of last year, and production of DCVax-Direct would be restarted, and then, days later at ASCO, that “multiple new clinical trials have been in preparation - the first 2 of these trials are anticipated to start in the coming months.” The brain mets trial had been cleared by the FDA and the DIPG and SHGG trial had been submitted and was waiting for FDA approval. So what happened? They were certainly capable of running multiple trials before, so that wasn’t it. The Sawston profits evaporated? I’m not buying the “scarce capital” excuse. What about grants? There’s dozens of government agencies funding medical research - the NIH alone gives away $32B a year, and there are literally dozens of private grants for billions more. But even if they didn’t go the grant route, the trials were relatively small, (a dozen patients to start) so they wouldn’t need to raise anywhere near $50M, and in the bigger picture, getting DCVax-Direct developed could actually create value for the company. I even speculated at one point last year that maybe the holdup was due to another entity (Merck?) being interested in DCVax and wanting to be in control of designing and running all the trials in their own labs, but this was obviously a stretch. There’s so much promise with Direct, and so much was learned during the Phase I trials and improved upon, so it never made sense to me why they wouldn’t they do everything they could to get Direct going. But I think I get it now. In Northwest Bio time, a year delay is really nothing.