Biotechnology companies have emerged from the COVID pandemic in “healthy if not robust” shape and investors are taking notice, says Prescient Therapeutics chair Steven Engle.

In his address at the company’s AGM on Friday, Mr Engle said biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies overcame challenging conditions to play “an incredible and significant role” in fighting the pandemic.

A series of medical and scientific breakthroughs have also helped the sector gather pace and supported the healthy volume of IPOs and secondary raises witnessed over the past 12 months, Mr Engle said.

He added there were more corporate partnerships between oncology companies and big pharmaceutical firms than the latter had made with any other biotechnology field, demonstrating the growing demand for cancer treatments.

The year was also transformative for Prescient Therapeutics specifically, too, Mr Engle said.

“A year ago, none of us could have anticipated the astonishing extent to which the world would continue to change,” he said.

“Despite the challenging conditions, it has been a year of outstanding achievement for the Prescient team, which has laid the foundation for significant future growth.

“We see these as just the beginning as our pipeline of innovative cancer therapies progress through their development.”

Investment into the biotech sector has been particularly high in 2021, with $483 million raised by the end of July this year alone – a figure that grows to $1.3 billion when IPOs are included.

Projects continue to advance

Mr Engle said demand for innovative cell therapies is growing off the back of the early clinical successes of these personalised treatments.

Prescient Therapeutics intends to fill this demand with its own next-generation cell therapy platform, OmniCAR.

But Mr Engle added the company’s other two targeted therapy projects, PTX-100 and PTX-200, are progressing through clinical studies and have so far produced “encouraging results”.

The company is also working on a number of other projects that are currently in “stealth mode”, Mr Engle said, and each has the potential “to add significant value for the company”.

Prescient’s recent successes have helped push its share price up more than 250% in the past year, with shares trading at $0.25 each when markets closed on 16 November. 

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Reach Markets have been engaged by PTX to assist with their investor communications.

Sources:

• Prescient Therapeutics, Annual General Meeting – Chair Address
• Prescient Therapeutics, About Us
• Prescient Therapeutics, Investor Portal
• Financial Review, Biotech blooms as capital raisings surpass $1.3 billion