And so with a very little float that is a very small fraction of our shareholders trading actively on any given day, there’s not really an opportunity for a market to be made for our stock. There’s not a lot of people who are buying, reselling. And those very few who do, we trade on average 20,000 to 25,000 shares a day out of over 8 million outstanding. It’s a very volatile situation. So I think our opinion is that that will change based on two things. As we get to data, which as those who have looked at our milestone slide will see it’s going to be occurring throughout ’24 and ’25. And also as we then are able to announce additional business development deals and ultimately do another financing, which will allow larger funds to enter the stock because they can’t do so on the market because of the low trading volume, I think we’ll see that all change.
But like most people right now in the biotech world, the real focus is on impeccable execution to data, generating as close to unambiguous data as possible and then letting the product [Technical Difficulty] themselves. So that’s what we believe is the problem. There’s certainly no issue with the fundamentals of our company, the execution for our plan, which has been scrutinized pretty thoroughly by a lot of potential partners who are also just sitting there waiting for us to show data.
Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Kemp Dolliver from Brookline Capital Markets.
Brian Dolliver: First question in regards to the ASCEND trial and admittedly, it may be too early to provide any insight on this. But the trial has enrolled very consistently and ahead of your original plan. And other than unmet need and potentially a great drug, which will just lay out as given for now, what are your thoughts with regard to why this has worked so well? Is it a function of the populations in Australia and New Zealand being relatively treatment naive and there’s less competition for trials? Or what have you seen going on that has worked to your benefit here?
Dr. David Mazzo: Thanks, Kemp. Appreciate that. I think we see a couple of factors that are helping the trial enroll very, very rapidly. First of all, it is a randomized and blinded trial. But in this particular trial, the people who receive the control arm are still receiving standard of care. So there’s no downside to joining this trial. It’s not as if you would be put on a true placebo and you would not get any treatment, which would obviously be unethical in an oncology trial. I think you’ve already touched on one of the situations there. There seems to be a large and growing presence of pancreatic cancer in this part of the world. And there are relatively few treatment centers because the population of Australia is concentrated around the edges of the country.
The country is enormous. But as you all know, the interiors referred to the — as the outback because it’s a desert-like area, there’s really very little population. People are concentrated in areas and they go to these larger centers pretty regularly. It’s not as if there are many, many centers around the country for them to go. And so the people who are at those centers have been actively involved in the development of our trial, of our drug from the beginning. It was in Australia that the early Phase Ib, Phase IIa, very compellingly positive data we generated. And so there’s an enthusiasm that I think is moving forward. And the fact that the addition of LSTA1, the standard of care doesn’t seem to exacerbate the safety side effects of the standard of care is another reason why people are very eager to take on this particular trial.
So as you pointed out, it’s enrolling very rapidly. Cohort A has been enrolled since that May-June time frame and we’re about 95% of the way there. So the official projection is we’ll be done by second quarter of next year, but I think anybody can do a quick extrapolation and recognize that it’s likely to be done very, very much sooner than that.
