Replies to post #1029 on Conatus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CNAT)

[pgh_maulers]

Happy New Year to you too.

Exciting times ahead !

Like your 1 year price target too.

[Inoviorulez]

If the additional ad hoc data comes out really good you are right on your target of $24 for 2017. For 2018 it will depend on the three trial readouts. If good will gap much higher, if mediocre hang lower, and if bad will collapse. GL to all

[lorema]

The company’s roots can be traced back to Idun Pharmaceuticals, which developed an orally active pan-caspase protease inhibitor over a decade ago.1 This drug, Emricasan showed such promise in activating cytokines (small proteins important in cell signaling), and preventing physiological cell death that Pfizer bought the company in April of 2005. Three years after this acquisition, Pfizer dropped the Emricasan program due to several failures to address safety issues of concern to the United States Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”).2 Two years later, the company’s CEO, Dr. Mento, and the team which originally developed Emricasan formed Conatus, and bought Emricasan back from Pfizer. Dr. Mento and his team were able to answer the FDA’s concerns, and the clinical hold that the FDA had placed on Emricasan was lifted in 2013.

http://lchisette.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/01/29/182811

[staccani]

$24 is a reasonable target once ENCORE LF trial is started and Novartis exercise its licence option. This is a near term target, expected in H1 2017. Therefore I would put it as a 6 months target.
By listening to Steve Mento remarks at the end of the recent conf call with the analysts, he was pretty clear on the fact that the option exercise is linked to LF trial start. The reason why Novartis wanted to have this , was to provide an incentive to CNAT Management to work hard and obtain this very important milestone as quickly as possible. Mento sounded very geared up and quite confident that the H1 2017 target will not be missed.
Also there is not much risk in it as all they have to agree IMO is the mix of surrogated endpoints and clinical endpoints with the FDA, but since there is nothing to treat NASH Cirrhosis, this will not be a problem.
So, all in all, a very achievable short term milestone and I expect a joint announcement for the LF trial start and the NVS option exercise
GLTA and Happy New Year