NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Med BioGene said after the close of the market on Thursday that it had no revenues for the third quarter ended Sept. 30.
The firm had posted revenues of C$1.5 million (US$1.5 million) for the third quarter a year ago. The revenues last year were derived from licensing payments.
Med BioGene's net loss for the quarter was C$79,633, or break even on a per-share basis, compared to a profit of C$1.6 million, or C$.02 per share, a year ago, according to a document filed with Canadian regulators.
The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company had no R&D expenses in the quarter, compared to C$14,511 a year ago. Its SG&A costs were reduced to C$78,249 from C$183,958 a year ago.
The company, which withdrew plans for an initial public offering in the US earlier this year, ended the third quarter with C$458,964 in cash and cash equivalents.
The firm recently amended a deal with Precision Therapeutics covering the commercialization of Med BioGene's LungExpress Dx gene expression-based test for early stage non-small cell lung cancer by mid-2013. Today, the company said that Precision is currently validating the test for use with frozen tumor tissue and starting clinical studies to validate LungExpress Dx with tissue preserved by RNARetain, a molecular fixative.
Collection of patient specimens has been completed and the final step of validation using RNARetain has begun, Med BioGene said. Precision also created an advisory board in advance of the test's commercialization.
"By restructuring the milestone payments in our commercialization agreement, we expect to extend [Med BioGene's] cash runway following the commercialization of LungExpress Dx to allow us the opportunity to demonstrate increasing clinical and commercial success of our test," Med BioGene Executive Chairman Erinn Broshko said in a statement. "As a result of our focused burn rate, we believe that [the company] currently has sufficient cash resources to continue with operations until approximately the first quarter of 2014.
"If Precision commercializes LungExpress Dx around the expected timeframe then, with receipt of the $500,000 in milestone payments from Precision relating to commercial launch, we believe that [Med BioGene] will have sufficient cash resources to fund operations until approximately the third quarter of 2015," Broshko added.