$AQST - You will see the cash burn rate is not that much. This company is very well run and pretty lean. The biggest cost for a startup biotech is clinical trials. Each trials can cost $100 mil or more. Not with $AQST. These trials are very different from typical trials where you enroll sick patients; getting them stablized on standard of care drugs then a wash out period etc… again very time consuming and expensive. Take the trials for $VKTX for example. The offering today was for… you guessed it- more trials. For $AQST, remember they can’t make people get to anaphylaxis. That’s unethical and not legal. So they test on healthy volunteers and check their blood for drug concentrations over time (PK, pharmacokinetic) and their pulse rate and blood pressure (PD, pharmacodynamic). This is because the drug epinephrine is not being tested. What being tested is the drug on a film. They know epinephrine works. So the FDA doesn’t need to see it tested on sick patients. Now they may have people who are experiencing mild cases of allergies but not severe or anaphylaxis. You also notice that the number of volunteers are pretty small. Unlike VKTX where phase 3 will be thousands of sick patients. $AQST 100 or 200 probably of HEALTHY patients who would take the medication and got their blood drawn and blood pressure measured and on their way home. No need to follow up 6 months later to see if they still benefit from the drug for example. These trials only cost several millions at most. $AQST is generating cash. They have a healthy drug manufacturing and out licensing business. Dilution possibility is there but low. Even if they do an offering it won’t be much. Think big picture. What are they about to do once Anaphylm is approved. Your children won’t know what an EpiPen is or the device that you stick up your nose. They will only know the Anaphylm! Looks like $VKTX handled the offering ok today. So will $AQST. I looked into their financials before picking them. That’s #6 on my qualifications check list. Please see my pinned tweet in my profile.
@BIOTECHSCANNER AQST balance sheet is extremely week. Lots of debt and negative book value. They need to shore it up through stock offering.
@BIOTECHSCANNER I’ve been buying but to play devil’s advocate: could the limitations on studying anaphylactic shock be a big negative for the FDA? The FDA seems, in my inexperienced and shortsighted opinion, to be really risk averse. Do they want to risk diving in on a radically new therapy?
@BIOTECHSCANNER I will wait until 07/25 for you to return. Understand that there isn’t a source out there more qualified to evaluate + willing to share this level of analysis. Find the drugs you think deserve capital support and we will gladly help fund worthy causes. As always, thank you