2023 is going to be another exciting year for Poolbeg Pharma
“…we are very excited at what we are building. We have identified POLB 001 as a potentially valuable companion therapy to be used in conjunction with existing CAR T cell therapies…”
There’s nothing glamorous about traipsing around San Francisco in the pouring rain, touting your trade from one hotel to another.
What is glamorous though is that your particular trade is the fight against infectious disease, and there’s an awful lot of interest from attendees at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference about your datasets.
This is what Poolbeg Pharma’s chief executive and new head of business development experienced at the start of the year when they attended the investment bank’s first big healthcare symposium since the pandemic.
Access to curated datasets was a big theme of the event, and both CEO Jeremy Skillington and David English were being courted for one-to-one meetings with those wanting to know more about the company’s two artificial intelligence programmes and the datasets already gleaned by the U.K.-based clinical stage infectious disease pharmaceutical company.
Data can be the gateway to expediting treatments, but at present Poolbeg is the gatekeeper.
Spun out of parent company hVIVO (née Open Orphan), Poolbeg hit the ground running after its 2021 listing, and by the end of 2022 had hit every milestone it had promised investors at IPO.
Even before JP Morgan’s event the company, which makes its money from partnerships, had started a collaboration with CytoReason which is interested in Poolbeg’s influenza data. The Israeli company is already in partnerships with big pharma including Pfizer, Sanofi and Roche. And in a sector where networks are critical, these names are of the blue chip, gold standard variety.
Influenza is being viewed by the pharmaceutical industry as the next big epidemic reality and Skillington says they’re looking for “molecules that they know will work in certain situations and will be ready for the next pandemic.” He thinks Poolbeg’s influenza treatment POLB 001 is a candidate for that.
In this conversation with Sarah Lowther, Skillington explains why POLB 001 is so precious, how it is being expanded into CAR T companion cancer therapy and with such an ambitious pipeline investors will likely see their rewards in share price increases rather than dividends.
Watch Jeremy present (below) Poolbeg’s investment case at this Investor Meet presentation.
Poolbeg’s Scientific Advisory Board member Professor Brendan Buckley answers frequently asked questions (below) on CAR T cell therapy and how POLB 001 could be a potential companion therapy.
Read the 2023 corporate presentation here
Follow the company on Twitter @PoolbegPharma
The author was remunerated but does not hold shares in the company
