Daily Brief Health Care: TSE Tokyo Price Index TOPIX, HighTide Therapeutics, Recce Ltd and more

• A company that does’t include a cash flow statement in its 1Q and 3Q financial summaries, which will now be mandatory, is a company that is reluctant to disclose information.
• Management groups have called for making quarterly disclosure voluntary. This time, a hand has been dealt with a compromise proposal to unify quarterly reports and financial statements in securities reports.
• While the risk of dropping quarterly disclosure in the near future is small, the major problem is that some managers are still reluctant to disclose information.

• Diseases with complex mechanisms like NASH are unlikely to be solved by drugs with a single target, but compared with THR-β and GLP-1s, our view on HTD1801’s prospects is negative.
• HTD1801 faces high R&D failure risk and challenges in obtaining the final approval for NASH indication. For T2DM indication, the current intense competitive landscape has dimmed its future commercialization prospects.
• Several original shareholders have already cashed out in advance, indicating that they are not optimistic about the prospects of HighTide. The valuation premium space after IPO could be lower-than-expected.

Recce Pharmaceuticals raised A$11.0m (gross) in September and October. Most of the proceeds (A$6m) will be directed towards the company’s clinical programmes for lead anti-infective candidate RECCE® 327 (R327), including the ongoing Phase I/II study of the IV formulation in healthy volunteers and in patients with uncomplicated or recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs). This study continues to advance, with the company recently dosing healthy subjects with the 3,000mg dose over a 15-minute infusion period, following a favourable safety review of this dose over a 30-minute infusion. We model that Recce is currently funded into CY24 and expect the company to seek additional funding, which may come from partnerships or non-dilutive arrangements. Following minor adjustments to our forecasts, we now obtain an rNPV valuation of A$551.1m (or A$2.71 per share), versus A$562.4m previously.