Such immunotherapy using CAR T-cells, a treatment for cancer, which costs Rs 3-4 crore in US, can be made available for Rs 15 lakh, if the technology is developed in the country.
A private firm is planning to in-licence the technology and is trying to make the therapy available for Indian patients for about Rs 35 lakh
ImmunoACT’s website also mentions a pipeline for other autoimmune therapies.
An aside: If Laurus is the company spoken about in the article from 2019, it means this has been in the works for a few years now. I’m amazed by how forward thinking they are, especially since at this time, APIs constituted >80% of the business.
Excellent news for the entire medical fraternity and the patients suffering from HIV.
It will have a major impact on Laurus Labs though, depending on the rate of adoption outside of the UK, which will depend on how quickly this can scale, what price point it will be offered (compared to daily tablets). The gradual shrinking of the ARV pie the world over may get accelerated a bit.
Need to be aware of goodwill that is already present and will somewhat increase. Management bandwidth issue due to ambitious diversification, presence of debt, dent in cashflows due to ARV sales are some areas where things can get stretched.
Strange. How should we read this that the senior management of Laurus is also taking a personal stake in the company? If 32% of the company was available, why didn’t Laurus take it all?
Leaving all the other perspectives, being an investor I am very very happy to see these kind of collaborations taking place between Industry and Academic startups in biotech space. These collaborations are much needed and hope this will lead to novel drugs and affordable solutions which can scale up and cater to our people. I don’t fear diworsefication here for Laurus and as the acquisition is well oriented with trajectory of Laurus Labs.
To me this is VC kind of investing, where the promoters of Laurus do not want to use too much of capital of the business. Laurus is just testing waters, we need to understand the ImmunoACT capabilities in depth.
Unlike Richcore where the end product is food protein not therapeutics , in this case it is still work in progress. But step in right direction ( Laurus Generics, Larus Synthesis and Laurus bio three verticals ) especially when ARV revenues are going to fall for sure , company is proactive in looking for other avenues to fill the gap.
Mr. Chava is sharing the risk by investing his own money along with Laurus, This reminds of Venkat Jasti of Suven, who injected own money into to research arm of Suven Life Sciences at the market value.
Do they have any approved treatments ? I don’t think so they have any , most of them are in clinical trials
The only hope we have at the moment is their clinical trials will be successful and they can get into commercial model very soon.
Most of these cell gene therapy treatments (all over the world ) are still work in progress, I know few people who are working in this industry, they are yet to launch products at commercial scale. Will discuss with them and share if something interesting comes out of the discussion.
How much cash do they (Immuno) have to spend on R&D, who are the other share holders ?
This is my personal opinion, but its actually good that senior stakeholders are putting in their own money as well. The best kind of opportunities are the ones where insiders have their selfish motives aligned with rest of the company. Both Lynch and Greenblatt have been big advocates of insider buying into business opportunities.
These kind of deals are also very common in private equity, where VC/PE firm funds the rounds and sometimes senior managers of PE / VC fund also participate with their own money.
I second this. I would also have more promoters making a small personal stake in acquisitions and taking more profit linked pay. At the end of the day, its another “form” of “skin in the game”
And, I wouldn’t really try to second guess Dr Chava. As long as I am convinced that he will always try to do the best for the business, I wouldn’t dare to think that I have a better read on where the opportunities and possibilities lie than he does.
it’s a bolt on M&A , that’s completely explain management capability , they r creating back up as FDF/API(commodity) won’t have pricing power although volume margin they can create like Divis, the shift towards technology in Biosimilar is obvious, before peers move towards it, they could have created enough capability & they have started it via BI which will give them edge over peers, I bet more on management rather than qoq statistics,
Cell and Gene Therapy has two parts Process Development (Technology ) and Product Development.
Why it is so expensive ?
Too much of R&D spent , various stages , steps involves many scientists (development, QA , trials ) equipment , consumables (media used to grow cells etc… )
Even the process is baselined and shared the same with some external / CDMO it is not guaranteed the process will work in the new environment. (Let us take a nearest example of Sputnik vaccine , Indian companies are still struggling and not getting the desired results with sputnik vaccine , instead now they are saying the results of sputnik light are as expected )
I am trying to understand the part of "reducing the cost of millions of dollars of treat to few lakhs " , this is not easy. Though there are available treatments available in USA / West the same might not work here. This needs to be fine tuned based on local environmental conditions.
One more thing it is not like one medicine fits all , there many many cancer mutations.
For example if two people has blood cancer , it not necessary both the cancer mutations are same. So first thing is which CART cell treatment solution available, accordingly the treatment starts.
I am kind of understood the process but unable to articulate so that a layman understand.
Here is the process flow from one of the publication
I agree with this statement. I have a friend which is in research of cancer in a university. I was talking to him about CART cell and he mentioned that it couldn’t be made generic and will have to be customized to treat individual. So I am also wondering how cost could be reduced to few lakhs.
