Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

ConjuChem’s CC is good news for GTCB:

That’s not a typo, but first a little background: ConjuChem has attributed the nausea problem with its GLP-1 diabetes drug to the fact that, at high doses, some of the drug fails to bind to a patient’s albumin as desired and instead circulates in free form. One questioner on ConjuChem’s CC asked why ConjuChem didn’t avert this problem by reformulating the drug with pre-bound albumin.

Can anyone guess the reason?

…

The answer was that ConjuChem was reluctant to use blood-derived albumin in the formulation because it might be contaminated. Since diabetics take a drug treatment chronically, even a tiny probability of contamination in an individual lot becomes a serious cumulative problem.

This is exactly the kind of worry that GTCB’s transgenically-produced human serum albumin intends to allay. There must be countless companies such as ConjuChem who would jump at the chance to use non-plasma-derived albumin in their biopharmaceutical formulations.

GTCB’s lead drug is ATryn, a transgenic form of anti-thrombin which has a pending BLA in Europe. However, GTCB’s albumin program, which is a couple of years behind ATryn, will likely prove to be more economically consequential in the long run.