Thursday, February 08, 2007

Pre-IND= ~$750,000

SGX announced that they've selected a Met inhibitor for pre-clinical development - SGX-523, which apparently is worth $750k, as SGX stock rose $.05 on the news.

SGX - with ~$37M in cash on hand, is valued at ~$61M (incl. cash), valuing their entire platform and pipeline (the Met program and a pre-clinical bcr-abl program) at $24M. Sadly, this values a pre-clinical lead at around $10M.

This makes SGX either a zombie, or prone for a big upward explosion sooner or later, as it wouldn't be hard to imagine SGX being scooped up by a bigger fish, given interesting data. Strictly speaking, SGX intends to file 2 INDs in the next 12 months, each worth ~$100M each (= a gain of $180M above the value already built), meaning that if SGX delivers and the industry norms hold, SGX stock would quadruple (though some cash and value would be burned over period leading up to the filings.)

Of course, this all depends on the math holding, and there's a significant downside, as with any drug development.

But the SGX story is more interesting than that - SGX has a service business (contract structural genomic analysis) where SGX resells access to their beamline facility. In the first 9 months of '06, SGX earned $13M in service revenue.

The same 9 month income statement shows a loss of $23M on that $13M revenue, but a large part of the loss is due to spending on a now canceled late stage clinical program. A naive guess says that of SGX's $35M in R&D YTD, $25M or more related to the canceled program, meaning that SGX COULD be at least breakeven on an ongoing basis, which is a good thing, since I don't think they're going to raise any cash soon.

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