Midatech Pharma PLC (LON:MTPH) Chief Financial Officer Nick Robbins-Cherry caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss its Spanish government loan approval.
Q1: Nick, this is your first interview with DirectorsTalk, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what Midatech Pharma does?
A1: As you say, I’m the CFO and I’ve been with the company since early 2014. I helped take the company through its initial IPO on AIM in December ’14 and subsequent listing on NASDAQ a year later.
Midatech is a pharmaceutical R& D business, we have a R&D facility in Cardiff and a manufacturing operation in Bilbao in Northern Spain. We are focussed on delivering a number of innovative technologies which are principally focussed on the oncology and rare disease spaces.
We have three technologies and they’re all designed to improve either the bio-delivery or bio-distribution of medicines, they’re all advanced, sophisticated, novel technologies and they’re all supported with a strong IP portfolio.
They way in which our technologies improve medicines is in one of three ways:
• We have a sustained release programme which is designed to improve the bio-delivery of medicines over a prolonged period of time, releasing those medicines into the body in a predictable uniform way.
• We have a local delivery technology which is designed to get particularly chemotherapeutics into the tumour without introducing those medicines that are systemically throughout the body. This is basically the principal problem of chemotherapy in that you get systemic toxicity and people get really sick so if you can get those therapies directly into the tumour, you have more of an effect on the tumour and less of an effect on the body generally.
• Our third platform technology is a targeted delivery mechanism which again takes the chemotherapeutic to the site of disease rather than just dosing it throughout the body and again, causing that systemic toxicity.
We have a number of in-house product programmes, principally the two lead programmes in that area are what we designate MTD201 Q-Octreotide which is a sustained release treatment for acromegaly and neuroendocrine tumours and our second key programme MTX110 which is a novel treatment for a rare but extremely deadly form of children’s brain cancer called DIPG. As I say, we also have these platform technologies, they’ve all been validated in the clinic, they’ve all been used in humans and, in addition to our in-house product programmes, they all have the potential to be used with multiple drug compounds.
So, from a commercialisation point of view, we’re seeking to commercialise our own products ourselves, look for licensing partners in certain global territories but we’re also looking for partners who can help us develop additional therapies using their drug APIs and our platform technologies.
Q2: Now, we saw this morning the announcement that the Spanish government has provisionally approved the company’s Re-industrialisation (Reindus) loan application, congratulations on that. Can you tell us a bit more about how this relationship came about?
A2: We’ve actually been in Spain since 2007. As I’ve said our technologies are quite novel and when they first came to the clinics, for use in humans, back in that period, we couldn’t find a contract manufacturing organisation, a CMO, who could manufacture our technologies for us, so we decided to do it in-house.
At the time, the Spanish government nationally, and also the Basque regional government, were being quite generous with soft loans and grant-finance and they were very supportive and helped us fund the construction of our state of the art facility in Bilbao and since then, they’ve continued to be very supportive, providing additional grants and soft loans.
I think they see the see the potential in the company and they see the potential in the technologies, they see the job creation we’ve brought to the Basque region and I think they see the future potential, both commercially and for creating new jobs in the future.
Bilbao is a great place to do business, they are great universities in the area, they produce very high calibre science graduate and postgraduates, it’s an accessible place, it’s commercially vibrant so it’s a good place for us to be. More recently, in addition to the Reindus loan, we’ve received about €2 million of additional finance from the Basque regional government over the last 6 months so they like the company and they like us being there.
Q3: Are you able to tell us a bit more about what the Re-industrialisation loan is and what it’ll be used for?
A3: It’s the Spanish national government loan programme, there’s approximately €400 million fund so it’s not the biggest but it’s a significant amount, we’re talking billion here. So, awarding Midatech Pharma over €6 million, I think it’s a significant validation that what we’re doing is something they’re interested in and that they value.
We’re going to be using this money to effectively go to the next stage of the company’s evolution so the Q-Octreotide, the MTD201, that is due to be launched in around about 2 years’ time and we obviously need the commercial manufacturing capability to produce that product when it goes to market.
As I said, we have novel technologies and the contract manufacturing organisations, they find it quite difficult to make anything that frankly isn’t a pill or a standard injectable so with our novel technologies, it’s very difficult to get a CMO who can give us a commercially sensible deal to make our products.
So, we want to stick to our model of building in-house, it means that we control the timelines it means that we can control the cost but obviously there is a capital requirement for building that facility and we’re very pleased that the Spanish government has seen fit to support us.
