Main points of investment
Innovative drug star focusing on "superbugs": the company is a multi-asset and clinical biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of safe and effective antimicrobial treatments for multiple drug-resistant "superbug" infections. Since its inception in 2007, the company has built research and development pipelines for four antimicrobials (contezolid, contezolid acefosamil, MRX-8 and MRX-10) to target multiple pathogens on the World Health Organization's "superbug" list.
The market for "superbug" antibiotics is vast, and the pain points of existing treatments are significant: multiple drug resistance ("MDR") is developing and spreading among both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. According to the 2016 antibiotic Resistance Review, multidrug-resistant bacterial infections are killing 700000 people worldwide each year. Due to the strong tolerance of superbugs to traditional antibiotics and the need for new antibiotics to treat them, there is a considerable market demand. The severe multi-drug resistant gram-positive antibiotic market accounted for 18.9% of the total antibiotic market revenue in the United States in 2017, but only 1.9% of the total antibiotic market revenue in China in 2017, so there is a huge potential market space in China.
At the same time, the existing treatment regimens, such as linezolid, 1) have strong side effects, weak safety, tolerance and applicability; 2) injection is the main route of administration, poor patient compliance and high treatment cost; 3) under the selection and elimination mechanism, superbacteria gradually increase their resistance to existing antibiotics. Therefore, the pain points of the existing treatments are significant, which is also a market opportunity for new antibiotic drugs.
The clinical effect in the research pipeline is good, and the certainty is strong: at present, the company has a total of four "superbugs".
Donovan's medicine is being studied. Among them, Contezolid and Contezolid Acefosamil are targeted at Gram-positive bacteria, such as MRSA and VRE, have entered the clinical Ⅲ phase and Ⅱ phase respectively; Polymyxin (MRX-8) and Lpxc (MRX-10) are aimed at Gram-negative bacteria, which are currently in the early stage of development.
Contezolid and Contezolid Acefosamil have the same therapeutic effect as linezolid in clinical trials, but have obvious advantages in the incidence of adverse events, hematotoxicity and inhibition of monoamine oxidase, so they have excellent safety and tolerance. Contezolid is expected to be listed in China in 2020. At the same time, the success rate of the third phase of clinical development of antimicrobials is as high as 75.8%, and the company faces a lower risk of late development. In addition, the success of contezolid clinical trials may reduce the risk of failure in future clinical trials of prodrug contezolid acefosamil.
Risk tips: drug research and development, approval, commercialization progress and success rate may be lower than expected; face fierce competition from other pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; policy changes; exchange rate fluctuations; and so on.