Inside the world of business

Full Nama report should fill in blanks

FURTHER EVIDENCE of the health of the Irish biotech sector came this week with news that Trinity spin-out Opsona Therapeutics is about to enter clinical trials with a drug it hopes will tackle the problem of organ rejection in kidney transplant patients.

Already one of the better funded start-ups in the European biotech drug development sector, Opsona has also received sector funding of €5.9 million from the European Commission’s seventh framework programme as part of a nine-strong consortium.

The Mabsot consortium has been put together purely to drive the clinical development of the drug OPN-305, which has been developed by the company on the back of research from three Trinity immunologists.

The news comes just a fortnight after another Irish biotech, Amarin, announced results of its cardiovascular drug – a purified Omega-3 fish oil – which pushed the companys US-quoted shares up by 80 per cent.

Opsona, although much earlier in the process, is bullish about its prospects, with founder Prof Luke O’Neill and executive chairman Dr Bernd Seizinger already looking to the prospects of testing OPN-305 as a therapy for others conditions, quite possibly cancer.

It is confident that delivering proof of concept on two “doable indications” could open many doors for the company – including partnerships with big pharma businesses to fund more expensive trials into the likes of Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, a trade sale or even a stock market flotation.

The company aims to deliver a valuation comfortably in excess of €100 million “in a reasonable period of time”.

That would deliver a notable return for Opsona’s investors – including Irish groups Fountain Healthcare, Seroba Kernel and Enterprise Ireland and international big hitters Novartis, Genentech and Roche.

Trial of kidney drug spells good news for Opsona

THE FIRST set of audited annual figures for the National Asset Management Agency should make for interesting reading when they are published in June as they will be an indication of how the Comptroller and Auditor General views its levels of transparency.

The unaudited figures for the final quarter of 2010 published this week showed a loss of €714 million after a bad debt charge of €1 billion was taken on loans due to further property declines.

Unfortunately, there was nothing in the accounts to show the breakdown of how the charge was arrived at. Hopefully this will be rectified in the full-year report.

First-quarter figures from Lloyds on Thursday and Royal Bank of Scotland yesterday show that they are continuing to write down property loans in their Irish units, so Nama isn’t alone in taking further impairment charges on loans that have already been written down fairly severely.

Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte said the Government would consider including Nama under the Freedom of Information Act. Being more open about transactions could assist in the recovery of a property market, he said. A full breakdown of Nama’s expenses, which totalled €75 million in 2010, is also essential to explain why they are so high.

Those familiar with the workings of Nama were keen to point out that the expenses would total about 0.2 per cent of loans under management (about €63 million a year on Nama’s value) for a full year and that the agency would pay about 2 per cent – or €630 million a year – if the loans were managed by external consultants.

The other benefit of not farming out the management of the loans is that Nama will retain at least some jobs in the banks to administer loans when the sector is facing thousands of redundancies.

Nama estimates that by maintaining the administration of the loans with the banks, which received the vast bulk of the €15 million in “master and primary servicer fees” last year, 500 jobs were retained across the banks.

This must be one of the few positives in a deeply troubled area.

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