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March 28, 2024

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InMed Pharmaceuticals (IN.C): New CEO is a straight up beast

In the spirit of ‘where are they now’ day comes another in my trilogy of companies I used to write about a lot, that I stopped writing about as they went into hiberation/preparation/organization mode, that have come out swinging in the last week or so.

InMed (IN.C) was once in my medical marijuana top 5. A small outfit built around the magical medication database of Dr Sazzad Hossain, which looks for approved medications that share molecular similarities with elements found in cannabis, in a bid to find ‘fast to approval’ opportunities in the biomed space, the challenge for the company was always going to be two-fold:

1) Keeping investors keen during the slow times in between news (this kind of research isn’t a ‘let’s finish it up before breakfast’ kind of deal)

2) Not running out of money with a company that had no easy monetization path for a while

Well, the previous CEO wasn’t so big on the first one, as news crawled and InMed simply dropped off the radar entirely for most people.

But not all people. One long holder emailed me recently and asked if I knew what was going on.

“I fear I may have lost my investment,” he said. I offered to touch base with the new CEO and see if that was indeed the case.

Holy cow was my timing good.

Eric A. Adams is the new head honcho at InMed, and he’s one of those CEOs that you just wind up and let go. His LinkedIn profile could just be a single huge-fonted word:

BIOPHARM.

Adams knows biotech. A US exec who looked over the InMed story from afar, contacted the team and said, this is very damn interesting to me, he took the reins in June and turned over the furniture from the outset.

“A lot of things needed to change,” he told me. “There’s too much opportunity here and the company needs to be ready when that opportunity starts to ramp up.”

Still in place: Deal guys Craig Schneider and Chris Bogart, who founded the company way back when, and Dr Sazzad, who (let’s face it) is the company’s only asset of substantial worth. He is the company. The company is Dr Sazzad’s head, tech, and what he’s been doing with it.

So what’s he been doing with it?

Well, that’s information coming soon. Suffice to say, the rubber is hitting the road.

The focus, however, is on Epidermolysis Bullosa, which we’ll call EB from now on because I’m not getting paid by the letter. Or at all.

EB is a skin condition where the epidermis isn’t connecting to the flesh beneath it, resulting in skin that tears like tissue paper. The shitty part of this? There’s no cure. But there is a treatment.

One product, discovered accidentally when an ointment used to keep bandages from sticking was found to have some healing effect, was acquired recently for hundreds of millions of dollars. InMed says the IP they discovered works better, and they’re moving it forward to Phase I soon.

There are other pieces of tech in play, such as a biosynthesis technology that… well, I’ll let them explain it.

The goal of InMed’s biosynthesis program is to provide an alternate low cost and high quality process for producing phytocannabinoids for its product candidates. Typically, phytocannabinoids are extracted from the cannabis plant. The extraction process can be expensive, and can result in unwanted by-products and impurities. Using metabolic engineering the plant pathway for producing cannabinoids can be recreated in a microbial host and will be devoid of the by-products and impurities seen with extraction. The process can also be performed at industrial-scale allowing for a low cost production of cannabinoids.

Dr. Sazzad Hossain states “We have made great progress in the last 8 months developing a comprehensive de novo biosynthesis system for cannabinoids using a multiple metabolic engineering approach and have been able to produce our target cannabinoids on a gram scale basis. Successful production of our target cannabinoids using a biosynthetic process is a significant achievement for InMed and is an important step for our product development program”.

InMed has filed a patent application covering its inventions in the organic and enzymatic synthesis of cannabinoids.

You’re scratching your head, I know, but other companies WANT THIS TECH, and it could be a nice near term earner.

There’s more, but what it all comes down to is, your new CEO is quietly sitting at the end of the boardroom table, not selling, not promising, just laying out a simple game plan that monetizes what InMed has been working on in the fastest way possible, in the area that they’ve decided has the fastest path to approval, with an orphan drug that nobody at the FDA is going to want to impede because BUTTERFLY CHILDREN.

Goddammit, if you can watch that and not want to get behind a company that may just be able to make those kids a little bit closer to whole, you’re a heartless beast.

Take my money. Do the work.

That said, if profit potential is more important to you than humanity, let me say this.

$6 million market cap. $400m acquisition of the only comparable. Share price up 30% since July. Volume jumping hard.

And, oh, then there’s the ongoing buying by insiders who are, deep down, probably pissed that I’m hyping their stock before they can buy it all for themselves.

I said, way back in the day, that it was value added weed plays that would be the big thing that would one day move cannabis into the mainstream, not growers. While growers continue to draw the lion’s share of interest, back at the turn of the 19th century, cannabis was the active ingredient in just about every medication and treatment out there. We lost all that when it was deemed illegal.

Now it’s back, and we have a whole lot of medicine to do. InMed is doing it, and as I press for more information, the new CEO is sitting there, looking at me like Dexter planning his next meal. He knows what this is. He can’t tell me what it is, but I can see he knows. He wants to hit fast forward and get to the part where the rest of us do too. He’s licking his lips and holding down his grin.

InMed Pharma: Game on.

— Chris Parry

FULL DISCLOSURE: Not a consultant, don’t own the stock, but I’m happy to give it a shove.

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1 thought on “InMed Pharmaceuticals (IN.C): New CEO is a straight up beast”

  1. thks for the update, did you also have a look on the share structure with all the outstanding options and warrants or no doubt about that ?

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