Eugene Ming asked 4 years ago
Any comments about Clearbridge Health? The financials seem to be quite promising. What are the negative factors that this company has within the four quardrants?
1 Answers
Victor Chng answered 4 years ago
Hi Eugene,
Can you share with me why do you find Clearbridge health’s financial promising?
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Hmm…Financials was artificially supported by gains in its investment (recent listing) – which is still loss making, albeit narrowing losses. Unsure if this company can clear even the Financial quadrant.
If I may add, I saw the equipment in action before (my laboratory help test the equipment). A bit finicky to use but serves a niche market of circulating tumor cells (which is a huge pain to isolate). But it is still one of the various methods to isolate tumor cells (not the most common which are Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded samples). What is done with the samples after that is more important for personalised treatment, and if I am not wrong (assuming the project stays the same), it is next generation sequencing.
Interesting insights. Do they have patents to the equipment? How do they compare vis a vis to their competitors? Are they near commercialisation stage? Seems like their services are rendered in Indonesia for now.
From cashflow perspective, they are still in negative operating cashflow. Perhaps better to look into this company after it is able to sustain positive operating cashflow for 2 quarters.
I’m not sure about the patents (they don’t hold any for the DNA sequencing, those patents are held by companies like Illumina/Life Technologies), but they are one of the few (if I was not wrong, the better one) for the CTC isolation equipment (that’s the thing they came out with), I don’t know about downstream tests as we only help to test the machine (DNA sequencing etc is another), I would guess it is the same as what we run in SGH actually. Sample testing and analysis (DNA testing) could potentially be outsourced to SGH and A*Star (that was how it was ran then, my lab was creating new tests for patients under the government research scheme).
We were offering the tests (Clearbridge CTC machine just generate the CTC samples for us to test with) to patients as part of trials for SGH side that is used to treat patients who are in our study. Not sure about them. SGH do have partnership with certain countries to offer to bring their wealthy patients over for such special tests/treatments.
Sounds like it’s still in clinical stage. Probably high risk venture to buy into the company at this stage.
The management of this company is the previous Cordlife CEO. You may want to read about this person before consider the investment.
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ex-cordlife-ceo-says-claims-he-left-over-pay-rift-are-inaccurate
Old habits die hard…Clearbridge mass announcement…issued 4.81m shares to CEO…equivalent of close to $1m.