Novogen
(ASX:NRT) is a biotechnology company. We are focused on the development of new drugs for cancer. Novogen has been around for several years. We are a company that has been through an enormous transition over the past 12 months. We have reconfigured the strategy of the company now; we have moved to clinical development, in preference to early stage research and moved to a model which emphasises partnership with big pharma company, rather than a go-it-alone strategy dependent on our own research.
We’ve brought in largely a new team of management, with a background in international big-pharma, who have worked on drug development very successfully with some of the largest companies in the industry.
We have re-configured our pipeline, most significantly through in-licensing at the end of last year of GDC-84, which is a drug that had been developed previously by Genentech, one of the world’s largest and most successful biotech companies (a company that is wholly owned by Roche, the world’s third largest pharmaceutical company). This drug (GDC-84) has completed Phase 1 human trials and our task now is to take this forward into Phase 2 trials to demonstrate its efficacy.
We are capitalised a little under $30 million. We have a cash balance of about $18.6 million (as of 31 December 2016) plus about $4.4 million through the Federal Government R&D tax rebate, so approximately $23 million in cash available to the company (as at 31 December 2016). This implies two things: we have a healthy bank balance to pursue our R&D efforts and it also means the company has a relatively modest enterprise value at present.
