(MENAFN- ProactiveInvestors) Jim Phillips makes no apologies for his ambitions for () which listed on AIM late last year.
He wants it to be one of the few success stories of the life sciences industry which has had more than its fair share of failures over the past three decades.
The US has successfully created some monsters of new wave medicines – the grande dames Amgen and Genzyme and more recently Biogen Idec Gilead and Celgene.
While not strictly a biotechnology firm – as we’ll see later it is at the forefront of nano-medicine – Midatech still wants to emulate the American model.
Phillips is not shy in revealing this means building a business valued at billions of pounds rather than hundreds of millions or tens of millions as it is today.
To help it do this it recruited an institutional shareholder base that understands and backs the Midatech model.
At the IPO last December which raised £32mln of new money it brought in the influential Neil Woodford who used to run one of Britain’s largest funds for Invesco but is now going it alone.
He is joined on the investor register by well-known City names such as and Octopus as well as Finance Wales – in fact around 70% of the firm’s equity is in the hands of long-term holders.
Meanwhile in chairman Rolf Stahel they have a man who helped create Shire a multi-billion pound healthcare business and one of possibly two sector successes that have been incubated by the UK capital markets (the other being ).
Stahel and Phillips worked together on EUSA a private cancer specialist they sold for around £480mln in 2012. The plan this time around is very definitely not to cash out.
So far in putting part of the investment case we have ignored the unique technologies at the heart of Midatech which unlike many of its peers on AIM is already revenue-generating.
Midatech is all about delivery. What do I mean by that Well its two platforms – carbohydrate-coated gold nanoparticle and its sustained release system – are about getting medicines to the right place in the right quantities at the right time.
The company’s gold nano-particles or GNPs for short promise a revolution in targeted therapies for cancer.
To radically simplify the process deployed (and being a non-scientist I’m really simplifying it here) these GNPs act as guided missiles.
In treating cancer with traditional chemo-therapy for instance they are programmed to hit ONLY a specific tumour type with their payload.
This highly targeted approach allows physicians to potentially administer lower doses and it also means there is little collateral damage.
Its Q-Sphera technology works in a different way to deliver the drug at theright time.
It is a sustained release platform and has adopted 3D and ink jet printing techniques to create particles that dissolve in a “certain way over a certain time-scale”.
Midatech also has a joint-venture with Monosol Rx of the US to develop a strip that slowly dissolves in the mouth that rapidly delivers insulin.
Potentially more effective and faster acting than the other non-injected forms of the medication it provides a painless easy to use alternative to pumps and needles.
The growing obesity epidemic means the diabetes market is a huge one valued at an estimated US$40bn - and it is expanding rapidly.
The insulin product is also the most advanced in the portfolio as it enters phase-II clinical trials later this year.
Unlike the traditional biotech the company has multiple shots on goal in cancer ophthalmology and neuroscience as well as endocrinology.
Seven of the treatments in development are repurposing drugs already on the market so could be fast-tracked through the regulatory process.
Meanwhile the oncology portfolio is targeting areas of unmet medical needs such as brain tumours liver and pancreatic cancer that have what’s called orphan status which means the time to market may also be truncated.
Midatech also has revenue generating partnership agreements with five blue-chip and specialist pharma companies that mark it out from the norm on the junior market.
It plans to be profitable within “four to five years” but could break-even earlier if it lands acquisitions that bring in additional income or perhaps even their own sales teams.
“We have a vision and that is to be a sustainable leader” said Phillips.
“One of my bugbears as a veteran of the industry is that Britain produces too few world-leading companies in our sector.
"We want to be recognised as one of the star companies coming out of the sector."
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