News: ACL Alchemia Says Cameron Petricevic Will Assume Role Of Chairman, page-19

"Don't see how it could possibly be a bad thing"
"Looks a positive to me"
"I'm reading it that a deal might be close"

We long term cynical punch drunk ACL holders aren't prone to such optimism any more. I remember the good old days we wistfully whiled away discussing what we might do with all the money we were going to get when our generic Fondaparinux got the "fast tracked" FDA approval. Approval was imminent, ..... for about 2 years.

We all awoke one morning to the announcement of the beginning of our dream wealth, FDA approval. There was much back slapping and mirth, Bacus would have felt at home.

Fast forward about 9 months and our manufacturer of choice the Indian pharma company Dr Reddys (there's a name to strike terror into the hearts of the faithful) found it was "cough" costing them a bit more to manufacture Fondaparinux than they had hoped "cough" so instead of sending us $5m per quarter as we had hoped, they charged us $10m to upgrade their facilities. We on Hot copper had strong views on this. With the newly upgraded facilities operational about a year later, we were most surprised when our margin went down, and then down some more, and then after about two and a half years, apparently ACL needed to pay them. We were quite stunned, but we would get used to that in time. For we frogs, the water wasn't boiling yet.  With our a cheeks spread wide ACL "negotiated" a sale of the rights to Dr Reddys for $17m, which was less than 1 year of the income we had expected to commence 4 years earlier.

Not to be phased, once the shouting had died down, we turned our attention to the second and even more important string to our bow, HyAct, a delivery system for Irinotecan about to enter ph3 trials after a pretty strong result in Ph2. Results were expected in about 18 months. The trial over ran this by about doulble resulting in us getting happy and clappy about how long our test patients must be surviving. We weren't wrong in that assumption, the patients on HyAct did live much longer than expected, unfortunately for share holders if not for themselves, so did the patients in the control group.

So the high profile personnel brought in from around the world to comercialise HyAct all went back home, we sold our only other patented tech to some ex-directors for "cough" $100k "cough" and turned out the lights. Within 6 months we were a shell with about $20m in the bank. Then the board did the first thing in ACL's life that benefited share holders, they sent $17m back to us. I can't remember the details exactly, but I know I got $76k which was better than I expected.

Since then there have been crickets, 3 years of chirups.

I now hold many multiples of shares more than I did at that time because it is by any measure a nice shell. There are no directors or employees left over from those days, but it is still Alchemia, and I'm not sure it isn't cursed.