IIQ appoints new CCO, as it looks ahead to commercialisation

Published 17-MAR-2025 13:51 P.M.

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Today, our biotech Investment Inoviq (ASX: IIQ) announced the appointment of Dr Emma Ball as its new Chief Commercial Officer (CCO).

We see this as a strong appointment as IIQ gets closer to market entry and commercialisation across its portfolio of highly promising cancer diagnostics and therapeutics as well as its exosome research products.

Dr Ball is an industry veteran with 25 years of experience across prominent roles at major companies like NASDAQ-listed Illumina Inc and Aussie biotech giant CSL Limited.

Here’s our quick rundown of why this is an important appointment for IIQ:

It strengthens IIQ’s commercialisation efforts for the company's exosome technology platform
It will support the advancement of key projects, including the ovarian cancer screening test and CAR-exosome therapy for breast cancer
Provides IIQ with strong commercialisation acumen as it pursues potential licensing deals across its portfolio

Today’s announcement notes:

“[Dr. Ball] led search and evaluation, due diligence and negotiations for multiple transactions including research collaborations, co-development, in- and out-licensing deals, and mergers, acquisitions and divestments.”

We like the sound of that, particularly considering some of the potential in IIQ’s product portfolio - not least of which is a breast cancer monitoring test.

A recent clinical validation study of IIQ’s breast cancer test showed that it detected 19% more breast cancers than the leading test (CA15-3 test by ~$500BN Roche) with an impressive 81% sensitivity and 93% specificity across a range of breast cancers.

How does this impact our IIQ Investment Memo?

We see this appointment as strengthening one of the key reasons we Invested in IIQ.

Large commercial opportunities from underlying technology

IIQ has an exosome isolation product which is already being sold to research groups. IIQ also has commercial agreements with Promega and a European biotech to bring IIQ’s exosome platform technology to market. Because IIQ’s exosome technologies can be applied to diagnosing and potentially treating many different diseases, we expect to see more partnerships where IIQ licences their exosome tech.

Source: 12 June 2024 IIQ Investment Memo

What’s next for IIQ?

We’ve highlighted a few of IIQ’s upcoming milestones this year that we are most interested in:

(Source)

In addition to progress across NEURO-NET and ovarian cancer, we are looking for two broad classes of updates:

Therapeutics - we want to see IIQ’s cancer “moonshot” therapeutic which has been shown to kill solid tumour cancer cells in a test tube, transition to animal studies.
Diagnostics - we want to see IIQ’s superior breast cancer test (SubB2M tests) pick up a lab partner to speed its path to market and first sales.

To get the SubB2M tests commercialised, the next steps “include publication of a scientific paper, transfer to a high-throughput instrument platform, additional in-clinic breast cancer monitoring study and securing a laboratory partner for commercialisation.”

We think Dr. Ball will certainly help with those efforts.