EDX Medical Group plc (LON:EDX) Chief Scientific Officer Professor Sir Christopher Evans caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss admission to AIM, its ultra-accurate diagnostic testing strategy, the Scottish prostate cancer testing programme, and the company’s commercialisation plans.
Q1: EDX Medical has announced its admission to AIM today. First off, congratulations on that, it’s obviously, an exciting time but can you just tell investors what EDX does?
A1: There’s a number of diagnostic companies around the world but we’re developing tests which are incredibly accurate. My entire focus is on very high sensitivity, extreme accuracy, almost ultra accuracy, and we’re working primarily in the areas of cancer and cardiovascular and infectious disease, mostly cancer. It’s an area I know very well, and we’ve got quite a large support of KOLs, etc. in that area.
So, we’re targeting the clinical diagnostic market of over £90 billion, there’s a lot to go for, and these tests will find their way into hospitals, private as well as the NHS, GP surgeries, even pharmacies. My main focus is going to be home use, is bringing these ultra accurate tests to the home, to patients who are obviously already ill and need to be monitored carefully. Also to those people who are the worried, as you call it, who would like to be testing and screening themselves for various early stage diseases. So, we’re quite excited about that particular market.
Q2: You yourself have significant healthcare listed experience. Could you just remind us of your background and some of the success stories that you’ve had?
A2: This is my 40th year since literally about 1985/86. I’ve been in biotech several years before that. Around about that time, I created one of the first startup biotech companies in the UK, in fact, in Europe, and that was in Cambridge. I then built a whole range of others also in Cambridge and listed three, four, five, six of them and I probably listed over 20 companies around the world: NASDAQ, various European exchanges as well as London. So, I’ve been around a long time.
Some of the companies, companies like Piramed, Cancer Company, Celsis was a diagnostics company. These companies, ultimately were all sold for hundreds of millions, very, very handsome returns, 6, 7, 8, 9 times multiples to our investors. I’ve also built a number of bigger ones. BioVex was sold for a billion to Amgen in cash, Vectura was again over a billion in respiratory pulmonary products and one of the biggest ones that I built up from a startup with the guys from King’s College floated on AIM and then we floated on NASDAQ was Verona Pharma, which I think round about this time last year was bought for $10 billion cash by Merck. So that was the drug we picked, and I think we picked a winner, same as with BioVex and Vectura and other things.
The aim here is that if you’re going to be in biotech and you’re going to pick projects to work and invest many millions into, you need to pick winners. You’re going to get things that go wrong, but you need some big winners, and I’ve had my fair share, so I’m quite comfortable with that.
Q3: Now, I noted that EDX has a really interesting shareholder list. Can you just talk us through some of the key holders?
A3: It’s mostly there are a few institutions, but it’s mostly very high net worth family offices and I tend to deal with the principals themselves, not the managers or the CEO of those offices. So, these are extremely smart, shrewd individuals who have made themselves obviously hundreds of millions or billions. They know exactly what they’re doing in business, they’re no pushovers.
So, people like Sir Tom Hunter, Sir Tony Gallagher, very, very accomplished shrewd businessmen. Steve Morgan built the Redrow builders project, again, billions, Steve, extremely shrewd individual. We’ve got John Scott, another famous investor from up in Scotland. Sandy and James Easdale brothers, McGill’s Buses, one of the biggest bus firms in Scotland, these are clever guys. Andrew Lloyd Webber is in there. We have the odd musician, we have the odd comedian like John Bishop, again, smart guys who want to look at things. They’re also interested genuinely in testing and early screening, particularly in cancer. This is on a lot of people’s minds as you get older into your 50s and your 60s. Cancer is everywhere and most families are attached to it somewhere or other.
So, these are great people with serious interest and serious financial acumen, they’re very good supporters of mine and EDX.
Q4: You mentioned earlier about winning products. There’s been some really exciting developments with the recent prostate testing programmes in Scotland. It’d just be great if you could tell us a bit more about that?
A4: We conceived this last year. We’ve been working on prostate and prostate tests now for about two years, looking at various biomarkers and obviously, it’s a very highly sensitive area. It’s in the press all of the time regarding PSA screening etc.
So, we are trying to develop and are succeeding, by the way, a number of different prostate tests. Tests that obviously will include PSA but will include other biomarkers. and we’re able to assess whether someone actually does have prostate cancer before they enter an MRI machine. We’re also trying to ascertain what we call the characterisation of the disease, whether this is highly likely to be aggressive cancer that’s present or non-aggressive cancer, so they can be treated and looked at very differently.
So, we set up this project, 25,000 men in Scotland, we plan for a 15/16 month set of trial up in Scotland in multiple centres and I am astonished at the speed at which this project’s developed. We are over 12,000 men: we’re probably 2.5-3 months into the project so we’re halfway there. Every centre we set up; Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, wherever we go, are sold out, they are completely occupied, several hundred people usually per day in these centres, giving blood samples. By the end of the project, we would have done probably hundreds of thousands of different data points and samples, saliva, blood, and urine, looking at multiple biomarkers, and proving and validating, beyond any doubt, the clinical validity of our tests on very large numbers of men. Not 400 or 500, you’re talking several thousand a pop, and in some cases the entire 25,000 so I’m really excited.
I’ve just literally flown back from Scotland, witnessing it, and we’ve got very strong support there as well particularly from some really big employers, like the Arnold Clark Group, the Malcolm Group, the Easdale’s, McGill’s, and these amazing people, Willie Haughey, Sir Tom Hunter, again one of our biggest shareholders, has helped set all these things up for us. These employers are bringing their employees into their own centres, where we are then able to do the testing very efficiently, very effectively and I’ve got a fabulous team up there, a very big team, carrying this out.
So, you definitely want to watch this space, because towards the end of this year, we’re going to reveal some very interesting results. Already, and as I mentioned earlier, we’ve only been at this a couple of months, we’ve seen a lot of cancers, we’re picking up stage one, stage two, stage threes, stage four, sadly, and a lot of these guys have no symptoms. That’s the astonishing thing. They are literally walking in smiling, giving their blood willingly to be tested, a lot have never had a PSA test, let alone anything else and then we’re discovering they’ve got cancer, and in some cases, late stage, stage four cancer. Now, those guys are whisked pretty quickly by the NHS as well as privately into MRI machines to look at where the tumour is, its location, is there more than one, and to run a biopsy, if that’s needed as well, and get them on treatment. That’s all occurring, literally, as I’m speaking. So, I’m just delighted with the impact of this project.
More importantly of all, for me, it’s the testing back in our Cambridge laboratories where these prostate tests of ours, which I don’t want to reveal too much about them just at this stage, are working brilliantly. They’re beginning to pinpoint and predict what’s likely to be seen in the MRI machine and we’re getting some of them spot on. For example, the other day, somebody with relatively low PSA, we predicted was an early stage tumour, probably non-aggressive. MRI showed the guy had a tumour and it was non-aggressive via a biopsy, and we called that with our tests in the laboratory. So, very exciting. Don’t get me carried away on this one.
Q5: What can investors expect from EDX Medical this year?
A5: Well, you’re going to get the output this year of the big, large prostate trial. We would have completely finished and will launch professionally our bowel cancer test, which is excellent, in my opinion. I think it’s the most accurate bowel cancer test, which can be used for screening, because it literally a test package which comprises three parts to it. It has a great DNA marker, which is very, very sensitive, over 95%. It has other markers. everyone’s familiar with what you call the blood markers in faeces; we call it via the fit test. We also have a genetic element, a polygenic risk element, and a genetic element in terms of the hereditary gene mutations associated with bowel cancer.
That service of a combination of different tests to help you characterise and pinpoint the stage of cancer, we will have with other cancers. For example, ovarian is another area we’re working on and ultimately lung and breast. Breast cancer is quite difficult, there are no direct, simple biomarker tests that are highly clinically validated and reliable. So, we’re looking at that very carefully. All of these will probably be finished by the end of this year. They’ll be coming out.
We have a fabulous pneumonia test. We work with the NHS Foundation Trusts in Cambridge. We’ve got some chemotherapy sensitivity tests coming through. They’ll be out soon and then, as I mentioned, a range of different hereditary cancer and polygenic risk or predictive cancer tests coming through. We already have liquid biopsy and solid tumour analytical tests. They’re already being sold, they’re already being used in a number of hospitals around the country, Spire Private hospitals as well as Royal Marsden etc.
So, what you could really expect from us this year, we’ve done two to three years of classic R&D development, the ideas have been turned into products, the products have been finished, a lot of them are in trials so that we get our MHRA registration and then they go off for IVDR registration in Europe eventually as well.
This year is the commercialisation year; this is when we start, ‘26 and ‘27 start selling all of these products for millions. So, very excited about that.
A lot of effort going into marketing, commercialisation, and distribution of these tests from everywhere; pharmacies, GPs, including home use, which is definitely a particular passion of mine because it’s been a long time coming. It’s been talked about a lot and there’s too many dumb tests being sold to people at homes, people deserve better. They want ultra accurate tests, that means something, and the GPs want to see them as well. That’s how you don’t overwhelm the NHS eventually. You’re only giving the NHS people they really do need to deal with and the same goes for private care.
So, a lot coming down the track. I’ve been doing this for a long time, as I said at the beginning, 40 years. I’ve built all the companies I’ve ever started. It’s probably about $18/19 billion worth of companies and about $17 billion of those have been exited in cash now. So, that would be probably scraped on my gravestone at some stage in 30 years from now, I hope, or 40 years, I’ve got a way to go.
It’s an exciting time and I think EDX Medical is a new breed of little company coming up so I think AIM is just spot on for us, it’s really good timing and I think we’ll give some good returns to some institutions on AIM. It’s going to be great news.
