While my blue chip stocks are sitting comfortably on the back burner, I decided to continue looking into penny stocks as it seems to be an accelerating market with the ever increasing number of new investors, courtesy of the Fed, their BRRRR and GME short squeeze frenzy. My first somewhat serious was SIRC (I’m still holding 45k shares of it and have no plans of selling them) and I’ve been searching for a few other plays to throw some money into. In the current environment, I thought a biopharma play can be a very lucrative bet so I started searching in that sector. After a week long research, I stopped on this candidate.
EnterSunshine Biopharma (OTC Pink: SBFM)- a pharmaceutical company focused on the research, development, and commercialization of oncology and antiviral drugs. In addition, Sunshine is engaged in the development and commercialization of science-based nutritional supplements. They are a Colorado corporation headquartered in Montreal, Canada.
The company focuses on 3 pillars: antiviral drugs, anticancer drugs, and supplements. Let’s look at the first two being the most important ones.
Antiviral.The company is actively working on developing an oral treatment of coronavirus, which seems to be highly promising. Based on their statements, their drug development program has not been affected by various mutated strains of the virus. From my understanding, the virus would need to mutate on the PLPro level to make the drug less effective. The new variant of the virus discovered in the UK is not the case (https://sunshinebiopharma.com/sunshine-biopharmas-coronavirus-treatment-anticipated-to-be-effective-against-the-new-variant-identified-in-the-uk/).
Here is the timeline of the drug development:
May 22, 2020. They filed a patent application in the United States for a new treatment for Coronavirus infections. The patent application covers composition subject matter pertaining to small molecules for inhibition of the Coronavirus main protease (Mpro), an enzyme that is essential for viral replication.
August, 2020. Completion of the synthesis of four different potential inhibitors of Coronavirus protease. These compounds are based on the technology described in our patent application filed on May 22, 2020.
September, 2020. Completion of the screening of our four compounds and subsequently identified a lead Anti-Coronavirus drug candidate (SBFM-PL4). The screening which pinpointed the lead compound was performed at the University of Georgia, College of Pharmacy under the leadership of Dr. Scott D. Pegan, Director of the Center for Drug Discovery and Interim Associate Head of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences.
October 2020. They expanded our collaboration with Dr. Scott Pegan by entering into a research agreement with the University of Georgia to further develop our Anti-Coronavirus lead compound, SBFM-PL4. They will proceed to conduct vitro studies followed by cell culture assays and assessment in Coronavirus infected mice before entering human clinical trials.
On Jan 14, Sunshine Biopharma received fourth tranche from a$2,000,000research investment provided by RB Capital Partners for corona virus treatment. Brett Rosen and Deborah Braun of RB Capital Partners Inc. stated, “We are very impressed with the Sunshine leadership team and their commitment to developing critical life-saving medical treatments. Our investment money has been met with ongoing milestones and we are pleased to be considered a long-term funding partner of the Company. We are looking forward to a potential uplist to the Nasdaq in the future”.
Yes! They are going to uplist and they just finished their application to uplist to OTCQB (https://sunshinebiopharma.com/sunshine-biopharma-completes-application-to-uplist-to-otcqb/)
Anticancer.
This one was very hard to dive into as it is very technical and I am not bio expert. I would definitely appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could weigh in on their findings here (https://sunshinebiopharma.com/anticancer-drugs/). From what I understood, their findings have been very promising. On November 18th SBFM announced a collaboration agreement with a Montreal-based company for the purposes of advancing the development of the SBFM anticancer compound, Adva-27a. The goal of this collaboration is to develop and implement chemical synthesis procedures for Adva-27a and test the resulting material in various types of cancer cells grown in culture. Based on the cell culture results, the SBFM drug development partner will conduct mice studies in preparation for the entry of Adva-27a into clinical trials. It is anticipated that the clinical trials will be for Stage IV pancreatic cancer indication and will be performed at McGill University’s Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada.
To sum this up, this is sort of a dark horse play. I’m still trying to figure out how good their cancer treatment is but considering the coronavirus situation, I think this company may explode out of nowhere if their team works right. Also, the fact that they got a $2m financing is a good evidence of them being on the right track to success.
Source:Reddit
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