Respert— My posts tend to be more aspirational

Respert—
My posts tend to be more aspirational and critical of pharma business-as-usual, rather than grounded in any direct experience in the biotech or pharmaceutical worlds. Your thoughtful and detailed perspective about how things are likely to go down is as clear a narrative as I’ve ever heard with respect to Cytodyn’s future. And the idea that we “could/should hear something at virtually any moment”—Wow! At times Cytodyn has felt like an ordeal rather than investment. Yet it really feels like we are getting so very close to the end game. And the comment that “they need to come to us” jives with my feeling that we are negotiating from a position of strength. Any thoughts on a CVR as part of the eventual deal?

I think it was Kat who said—more or less—that getting leronlimab to Big Pharma would get the drug to patients much quicker than we could on our own. I suspect many feel that way. And if that’s true—and there are no shenanigans or slow-walking from the acquiring firm—then I think that is a trade-off well worth doing. Absolutely no doubts there!

My final thought comes from living in a decade in San Francisco in the 1980s. You couldn’t avoid the AIDS epidemic, the fear and mystery surrounding this novel disease as so much was unknown. It was a death sentence back then. I was going to art school at SF State, but worked for a contractor doing carpentry during summers and breaks. (A lesbian contractor, for the record. It is San Francisco after all!). One of our jobs was making and installing brightly-colored formica panels in the stairwell of an AIDS clinic in the Mission. Brighten the mood a bit. I recall lots of gaunt, sick men passing me on their way up the stairs for appointments.

I’m looking at Dr Jay’s CV right this moment. He interned and did his residency at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco from 1986 to 89. So, he choose to come out to SF and do his residency right when the AIDS epidemic was raging. Major props from where I sit. ACT-UP opened it’s SF chapter in 1988, and Dr Jay became CEO and Medical Director of Quest Clinical Research in 1989. Doing front-line research on HIV. At that time a commitment to medical care and research for HIV patients couldn’t be separated from the activist and political side of things. (Fauci didn’t change his tune on AIDS until 89). I give Lalezari so much credit for being in the trenches for so long. Basically from the beginning. And his MA was in English Lit from the University of Virginia! Pretty well-rounded guy.

The point being—if there is any CEO of cash-poor biotech company that might think outside the box in terms of business-as-usual… it would be Dr Jay. Your scenario of a partnership leading to a buyout looks quite reasonable to me. It looks like the surest and quickest way to approvals and getting leronlimab into the bodies of patients. While there are other potential paths forward, I don’t claim to have insight into how they might play out. Building out that marketing/regulatory/sales team—pipe dreams on my account. No signs of that getting underway, and no money to do it. I don’t mind being schooled when you are so clearly correct.

But if you lined up four CEOs against a wall and asked “which one of these is not like the others”…

—Sherlock/peace out—