Conference Call Recap: The Verbatim Version The
Post# of 148160
The call kicks off with a wonderful discussion concerning forward looking statements and how shit could go sideways or foreways, possibly crossways. Some kind of ways. If you’re like me you’ve recorded this portion to listen to again later when you’re alone, and you’ve also bought puts on foreway options to hedge your bets. Shit, I remember back in my college days when a foreway meant something different. Good times.
Ooh, now we’re into the meat and potatoes now that we’ve gotten the legal stuff out of the way. Good news if you had “restore credibility” on your bingo card 17 times because five minutes into this call it’s been referenced constantly.
How hard would it be to change “to restore credibility within the scientific community” to “to ensure we put forth the strongest scientific case for Leronlimab possible”? Or change “to restore credibility with the FDA” to something like “working hard to make sure that we maximize our interactions with the FDA and provide unassailable data in the formats they require, ensuring we minimize any potential for delays or setbacks on the path to approval”?
For fuck’s sake can we PLEASE shut up about past credibility problems? It’s in the past. It’s time to act like the past shit that wasn’t up to snuff never happened, because at this point it doesn’t matter. What matters is making good, strategic decisions moving forward. This isn’t right and we’re fixing it. Here’s the timeline. This is missing and we’ve identified that. Here’s how we’re going to rectify it and our expected timeline. That program is on track, and here is where we stand.
Management is absolutely trying to do things the right way and bring this ship to port, but every time they start to talk about today or tomorrow they can’t help but frame it with issues from the past. Cut that shit out. It does no good and it’s not necessary. If you fucked up in a relationship right before finding the person you really love, would you preempt every romantic session with the admission that you screwed up a former relationship?
Hey babe, I know we’re about to make love and I’m super excited about it. I mean, I’ve been working on this pinky thing I’m calling “The Jackhammer” that I can’t wait to show you. I’m gonna pair it with that thumb thing I did that one time in Cancun called “The Thumper” and you’re gonna love it. I can’t friggin wait for you to experience it. But before we start I think it’s important for you to know about Stacy. You see, Stacy and I use to date and man oh man did we do some nasty stuff together. There was peanut butter and toys and clamps and industrial sized vats of petroleum jelly. It was some real freaky shit. And I just think it’s important for you to know that things used to get real disgusting with Stacy. Sometimes illegal, if I’m being honest. Hell, I can’t go back to France or I’ll do major time. Thank god for extradition laws. But listen, let me reiterate that I’ve been a real douchebag in the past. I’ve cleaned up my act and as you can see, I’m a pretty fantastic catch now. I just can’t stress enough that I used to be a disaster. DIS-ASS-TER. Now let’s get you out of those clothes…
Now we move on to the Tanya portion of the evening. She assures us that everyone is working hard and the board is holding the company accountable for their strategy and decisions. Then she begins talking about the search for a new CEO and as she rambles on and on it becomes muddy as hell that maybe, just maybe, they’ve hired a new CEO.
A couple hours later she gets to the point, and yes, we have our new CEO.
Except that he’s just the president first. Then, assuming he says “credibility” enough times he’ll earn enough company credits to become CEO. Not sure why that extra designation will take six months before it happens, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, we know exactly why. Cytodyn timelines are like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Everything can be in place, with the people and the football all positioned for a great attempt at a field goal. But Lucy keeps pulling the ball at the last second, resetting the timeline and expectations. It doesn’t ever get discussed, but Lucy is an asshole. Just let him kick the damn thing for once. He’s a kid who’s already balding. Let him have something, for crying out loud.
Oh! Now it’s time for the Kelly & Recknor show.
It starts off and it has a middle and then it ends.
Alright, alright, I’ll go into more depth.
The good news is that everyone is still optimistic. The bad news is that everything will continue to take even more time than expected. No worries though. Minor stuff. Just gotta work it and rework it and wait longer. Schedule meetings with the FDA and go out to actively seek partners. But in the meanwhile we found out some interesting information on the mechanism of action. Apparently Leronlimab at 350mg (lower dosage) shows different effectiveness and biomarker data than a 700mg (higher) dosage.
Normally you can predict what a higher dose will do. More efficacy is possible. Equal efficacy is another, because at some point you max out the capability of the drug at some particular dose. But rarely do you see it work way better at a lower dose. It reminds me of a drug called Mirapex, which was originally used in Parkinson’s patients at about 2 grams per dose. Later they found that it had a positive effect in patients diagnosed with restless leg syndrome. But the dose they used for that was .125 MILLIGRAMS. That’s a massive difference in dosing. Which also reminds me of a friend who works at Pfizer and many years ago helped me get into a drug study to make some extra cash. He told me that it was safe (it was) but that I should be wary of other studies for experimental drugs because they’d had a study for a drug to treat insomnia that went bad. They picked the wrong starting dose and had really difficult times waking up the participants.
Scary.
Anyway, my point is that it’s pretty interesting that higher/lower doses of Leronlimab might be resulting in significantly different effects on the immune system. Not just stronger or weaker effect, but literally causing different effects and pinging different biomarkers from each other.
Chris Recknor nerds out for ten straight minutes and I follow most of it but immediately forget it.
We’re told at some point that we’ll need to authorize new shares. It might have happened earlier and I just blacked out during that part, but it’s not a good thing. That doesn’t sound like a company about to partner with someone who would/should be giving us gobs of money. Interestingly, we hear none of the same old phrases about companies under NDA and things heating up like we have on every other call. Kelly sounds like we’ve just now decided to get proactive in looking for partnerships. It honestly sounded like we have nothing on the horizon and anything that comes along will be due to our efforts moving forward. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this part of the call is what made me the most unhappy.
Before you know it we’ve moved on to the question and answer session where, once again, they read lots of questions from idiots who can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum of due diligence. Or questions that were clearly negatively biased. So we’re just going to abandon the BLA for HIV and go bankrupt, huh? Care to comment? Or both of these things in the same question. Are we ever going to find out how the 700mg arm did and when will we run out of money?
Kelly and Miggie put a button on it and the call ends.
If you were to take everything we know about Cytodyn, Leronlimab, and how they’ve communicated to us in the past away, I’d say this call could be looked at positively. New eyes hopefully see the potential.
That being said, I envision a little drop tomorrow. Nothing major. I think the volume this week speaks, well, volumes. We’re no longer the same fertile ground for shorts and day traders because we’re not trading a ton of shares each day anymore. Maybe they’ll roar back when a PR hits, but it seems they’ve moved on. I’m probably wrong about everything, but that’s why the famous phrase “don’t take your stock advice from Respert24” exists.