Is the "no buyout" path a possibility for CYDY?
See WSJ article below - lots of (current and potential) parallels to Leron, some of which I bolded for emphasis...
P.S. THANK YOU TO THE GREAT DR. JAY FOR ALL OF YOUR (ONGOING) HARD WORK!!!
_________________________________________________________________________________
The Wall Street Journal
" Why the Drugmaker Behind a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough Stayed Independent "
Revolution Medicines attracted takeover interest but decided to go it alone. This week’s FDA approval of its pancreatic cancer pill is the payoff.
Aug. 27, 2026
Earlier this year, an oncology biotech with no drugs on the market—just promising research—was attracting takeover interest. Revolution Medicines stayed independent. This week, that bet paid off.
The 12-year-old drugmaker, more commonly known as RevMed, had spent much of its existence trying to solve a scientific puzzle that had stumped some of the industry’s leading researchers. It successfully targeted a common cancer mutation, resulting in a drug that nearly doubled how long people with pancreatic cancer survived—a remarkable breakthrough for a notoriously deadly disease.
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved its new drug, Rasonque, the Redwood City, Calif., biotech is taking on its next challenge: figuring out how to quickly bring the drug to the thousands of patients desperate to take it.
RevMed CEO Mark Goldsmith, a doctor-scientist who has led the company since its founding, said last year he faced a decision about whether the company should deliver this product on its own, a complicated and costly undertaking.
He was approached by financial institutions that offered money to help RevMed reach global markets, he said. “When they asked me what sort of scale of financial support did we need, I told them it was big,” Goldsmith said. “I didn’t think they’d continue the conversation, and they came back and said, ‘We’re interested.’”
RevMed is set on doing this on its own. In a matter of months, it has built its first-ever sales force, distribution network and reimbursement operation from scratch. It has struck deals to make the drug overseas and is planning to invest in several manufacturing lines to guard against bottlenecks. “Successful biotechs tend to be acquired by large pharma companies,” said Michael Schmidt, a biotech analyst at Guggenheim. “Having a company remain independent, at least at this stage in the game, is definitely something that’s very exciting and interesting to follow.”
Wall Street expects Rasonque—which costs more than $477,000 for a year’s supply—to generate more than $1 billion in sales as soon as next year. The company has more assets in development that could also hold blockbuster potential. Rasonque targets a mutated protein called RAS that drives about a third of all cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic tumors. For decades, drugmakers had called RAS “undruggable,” because its surface was too smooth for traditional molecules to latch on to.
The company spent nearly a decade trying to make it work anyway. By April, it had the data to support its hypothesis. In a 500-person study, patients on the drug lived a median of 13.2 months—nearly double the time those on standard chemotherapy survived. Rasonque wasn’t part of RevMed’s portfolio. Its lead drug, which targeted a different protein involved in cancer, had attracted investment from Sanofi, but the French pharma company walked away from it in 2022. Across the country, Harvard University researcher Greg Verdine had started a company, Warp Drive Bio, that was targeting RAS with a technology called “molecular glue”—compounds that recruit a helper protein, latch on to RAS and block its signal that drives cancer cells to multiply.
During a retreat on Cape Cod, Mass., Goldsmith, RevMed’s CEO, found himself sitting next to Laurence Reid, then-CEO of Warp Drive. Over a clam bake, Goldsmith brought up the subject of licensing Warp Drive’s technology to RevMed to target RAS. Reid balked at the idea of licensing away the company’s core technology, Goldsmith said, so RevMed decided to acquire Warp Drive instead.
“We had decided we wanted to embrace RAS, we needed to get some technology to give us a differentiated approach,” Goldsmith said. “The opportunity was very particular.” To close the deal, Goldsmith had to pull off a boardroom maneuver. Warp Drive’s largest shareholder at the time was Sanofi. Goldsmith said he phoned the French company’s leadership to make sure they didn’t feel blindsided, and pitched the idea of swapping their majority stake in Warp Drive for some of RevMed’s equity.
It worked. In 2018, RevMed bought Warp Drive in an all-stock deal, absorbing its technology and resetting the company’s trajectory. The breakthrough came in 2020, when the company’s researchers showed that the drug that would later become Rasonque targeted RAS in all of its variations. Other testing showed it was tolerable. “It was serendipity,” said Kevan Shokat, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of RevMed. “This is what happens in chemistry sometimes: You get a molecule, and it does something a little more than you expect.”
To help fund the drug’s launch, RevMed struck a deal with a company called Royalty Pharma that gave it access to up to $2 billion in funding in exchange for future rights to a share of Rasonque and another drug’s sales.
“We were going to build the whole thing ourselves,” Goldsmith said, adding that the company worked out an attractive deal and “simply made the decision.” Goldsmith is now responsible for bringing Rasonque to market, a rollout that actually began nearly four months ago when the FDA allowed RevMed to distribute the medicine as part of a compassionate-use program before approval.
____________________________________________________
As always... I remain... #BULLISH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8HY1FW3KoM
See WSJ article below - lots of (current and potential) parallels to Leron, some of which I bolded for emphasis...
P.S. THANK YOU TO THE GREAT DR. JAY FOR ALL OF YOUR (ONGOING) HARD WORK!!!
_________________________________________________________________________________
The Wall Street Journal
" Why the Drugmaker Behind a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough Stayed Independent "
Revolution Medicines attracted takeover interest but decided to go it alone. This week’s FDA approval of its pancreatic cancer pill is the payoff.
Aug. 27, 2026
Earlier this year, an oncology biotech with no drugs on the market—just promising research—was attracting takeover interest. Revolution Medicines stayed independent. This week, that bet paid off.
The 12-year-old drugmaker, more commonly known as RevMed, had spent much of its existence trying to solve a scientific puzzle that had stumped some of the industry’s leading researchers. It successfully targeted a common cancer mutation, resulting in a drug that nearly doubled how long people with pancreatic cancer survived—a remarkable breakthrough for a notoriously deadly disease.
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved its new drug, Rasonque, the Redwood City, Calif., biotech is taking on its next challenge: figuring out how to quickly bring the drug to the thousands of patients desperate to take it.
RevMed CEO Mark Goldsmith, a doctor-scientist who has led the company since its founding, said last year he faced a decision about whether the company should deliver this product on its own, a complicated and costly undertaking.
He was approached by financial institutions that offered money to help RevMed reach global markets, he said. “When they asked me what sort of scale of financial support did we need, I told them it was big,” Goldsmith said. “I didn’t think they’d continue the conversation, and they came back and said, ‘We’re interested.’”
RevMed is set on doing this on its own. In a matter of months, it has built its first-ever sales force, distribution network and reimbursement operation from scratch. It has struck deals to make the drug overseas and is planning to invest in several manufacturing lines to guard against bottlenecks. “Successful biotechs tend to be acquired by large pharma companies,” said Michael Schmidt, a biotech analyst at Guggenheim. “Having a company remain independent, at least at this stage in the game, is definitely something that’s very exciting and interesting to follow.”
Wall Street expects Rasonque—which costs more than $477,000 for a year’s supply—to generate more than $1 billion in sales as soon as next year. The company has more assets in development that could also hold blockbuster potential. Rasonque targets a mutated protein called RAS that drives about a third of all cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic tumors. For decades, drugmakers had called RAS “undruggable,” because its surface was too smooth for traditional molecules to latch on to.
The company spent nearly a decade trying to make it work anyway. By April, it had the data to support its hypothesis. In a 500-person study, patients on the drug lived a median of 13.2 months—nearly double the time those on standard chemotherapy survived. Rasonque wasn’t part of RevMed’s portfolio. Its lead drug, which targeted a different protein involved in cancer, had attracted investment from Sanofi, but the French pharma company walked away from it in 2022. Across the country, Harvard University researcher Greg Verdine had started a company, Warp Drive Bio, that was targeting RAS with a technology called “molecular glue”—compounds that recruit a helper protein, latch on to RAS and block its signal that drives cancer cells to multiply.
During a retreat on Cape Cod, Mass., Goldsmith, RevMed’s CEO, found himself sitting next to Laurence Reid, then-CEO of Warp Drive. Over a clam bake, Goldsmith brought up the subject of licensing Warp Drive’s technology to RevMed to target RAS. Reid balked at the idea of licensing away the company’s core technology, Goldsmith said, so RevMed decided to acquire Warp Drive instead.
“We had decided we wanted to embrace RAS, we needed to get some technology to give us a differentiated approach,” Goldsmith said. “The opportunity was very particular.” To close the deal, Goldsmith had to pull off a boardroom maneuver. Warp Drive’s largest shareholder at the time was Sanofi. Goldsmith said he phoned the French company’s leadership to make sure they didn’t feel blindsided, and pitched the idea of swapping their majority stake in Warp Drive for some of RevMed’s equity.
It worked. In 2018, RevMed bought Warp Drive in an all-stock deal, absorbing its technology and resetting the company’s trajectory. The breakthrough came in 2020, when the company’s researchers showed that the drug that would later become Rasonque targeted RAS in all of its variations. Other testing showed it was tolerable. “It was serendipity,” said Kevan Shokat, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of RevMed. “This is what happens in chemistry sometimes: You get a molecule, and it does something a little more than you expect.”
To help fund the drug’s launch, RevMed struck a deal with a company called Royalty Pharma that gave it access to up to $2 billion in funding in exchange for future rights to a share of Rasonque and another drug’s sales.
“We were going to build the whole thing ourselves,” Goldsmith said, adding that the company worked out an attractive deal and “simply made the decision.” Goldsmith is now responsible for bringing Rasonque to market, a rollout that actually began nearly four months ago when the FDA allowed RevMed to distribute the medicine as part of a compassionate-use program before approval.
____________________________________________________
As always... I remain... #BULLISH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8HY1FW3KoM
3
