HBV RNAi or Nothing
It is now 4
years that Wunderkind Vivek Ramaswamy handed you a bag of worthless small
molecules for half of what was then one of the premier nucleic acid
therapeutics companies with a strategically valuable position in RNAi
Therapeutics and bright prospects in mRNA Therapeutics and genome editing.
To this day, I wonder what he put into your drinks that you would agree to such a deal.
Today, your
actions have destroyed almost all of that value as close to a dozen clinical
candidates, one after the other, have failed in development revealing shocking
deficiencies in evaluating preclinical safety.
Meanwhile, shareholders have lost almost everything as the share price has
been decimated from around $15 to less than a dollar as I type.
But instead
of dwelling on the past, I want to look to the future and make it very clear to
you that with your in-house capsid inhibitor having been abandoned last week,
you have no choice, but to now try and extract as much value as possible from
your HBV RNAi candidate ABUS-729 with the goal of selling the company. $5 per
share (~$400M) for a compound backed by phase I clinical data showing it to be safe,
potent, and fairly long-lasting in knocking down its targets would seem
reasonable given the interest in the space for RNAi assets and achievable
before 2021.
Waiting for
in-house candidates to mature enough to combine them with 729 would leave you
too far behind the competition and cause you to waste your other main current
asset: the $100M in cash balance (don't even think of in-licensing yet another poorly validated small molecule!). $100M
meanwhile would allow you to comfortably develop 729 to clinical validation. This, of course, also means that you need to
cut your functions to what is strictly necessary to achieve that goal,
including eliminating all of pre-clinical research.
Further
cash could be raised by monetizing your stake in Genevant.
The time to act decisively is now.
