RE: Yawn!!! And other reactions...Bless you BFW, an argument, an intellectual one, not the "you're a jerk" kind of argument! Even if one only owns a thousand shares, there are ten's of thousands of dollars on the line. It's certainly worth putting some effort into reading about it, thinking about it and writing about it. Owning tens of thousands of shares certainly warrants that effort.
CVD is indeed the goldmine, BFW, and yes, Alzheimers incidence and APO-A1 levels are simply correlational at this point, but it's important enough and valuable enough to RVX and its advisors for RVX to patent NexVas for the indication, to even give it a name and make a separate program out of it. Since pharmas must start the process of drug development based on such nebulous correlations, must spend millions and billions before they have the final answer, my contention is that whoever gets NexVas PR dare not leave NexVas AD and VI for somebody else, not when to leave them to another pharma could result in, first, market loss due to cannibalization and second, lost opportunity with the other indications. I think that may be a major reason for the delays in a buyout, the fact that RVX separated them all and wants value for them. Before the separation the pharmas knew the opportunity they had but separating them and raising the price made such "theft" on the part of the pharmas impossible.
I remember asking DM a couple of years ago about the Alzheimers/HDL connection and whether separate drugs would cannibalize each other's market, raise a patient's HDL to prevent heart disease and the same patient never develops Alzheimers, that sort of thing. He said they wouldn't cannibalize each other. I was disappointed that I got it wrong. Ask him now. RVX talks about that possibility now. There's a reason why there are separate programs and that's to raise the sum of the NexVas values. If I were the one making the sales pitch to the pharmas, I'd be using that cannibalization argument for buying it all. The NexVas AD drug, if offered cheaply enough, could be prescribed for CVD (wink wink) in place of NexVas PR, something that's unspoken of but existent in medicine. The doctor, a friendly, activist cardiologist, would say, "Take this, you won't get Alzheimers, or CVD."
On the other hand, for a pharma to take on the commitment to concurrently develop 3 programs, all billion dollar programs, is in a way placing a good piece of the company's future all in one chemical basket. There may be something inherently dangerous about manipulating APO-A1 by any means and if so, all 3 programs could fail at once. That's very unlikely to be so and there's more than correlative evidence of that. This is a business risk-versus-reward decision.
And on another hand altogether, the correlaional relationship between Alzheimers incidence and APO-A1 levels suggests that lots of research is needed on this and that NexVas AD trials are way downline anyway, long enough away maybe for NexVas PR to work its magic not only on CVD but also on Alzheimers. This would leave the company that owns only NexVas AD with an open door to benefit from the NexVas PR owner's experience, something I would think unacceptable to the NexVas PR owner. This delay also suggests the opportunity for the owner of it all to extend patents beyond now-apparent limits. It all comes back to the one-company-takes-all argument.
This AD-delayed scenario may also mean that a pharma takes out RVX and leaves NexVas AD in RVX Therapeutics. We would get cash for RVX and shares in RVX Therapeutics (RVXT). RVXT could be left with a milestone type of agreement for AD with the RVX buyer. The trouble with this is that the RVX buyer would have to pay so much for the AD agreement that they might as well buy it in the first place. Other pharmas would love to benefit from the NexVas PR owner's experience and may very well be willing to pay a high price for RVXT, so the PR buyer would also have to pay. There always seems to be motivation for one company to buy it all.
Neither I nor anybody else knows how this aspect of the deal will work out, despite what several sleuths present here. I can't imagine this all playing out in any fashion other than a spate of bids and counter bids flying in at the very end with no clarity until all pharmas but one are beaten back.
And like everybody else here, I can offer nothing but conjecture. On the one hand it's this way but on the other hand, it's some other way. Harry Truman had trouble getting consensus from his economists. He exclaimed one day, "What I need is a good one-handed economist."
Love it when people speak with intelligence, especially when they disagree with me or present reasoned argument. I imagine that I can beat my 4 year old granddaughter at chess, but not her father, and for that he's the more fun to play with. Well, my granddaughter is fun too. The knight can gallop from shore to shore in single bounds and the king is often found in another kingdom altogether. Great fun but it's not chess. Kind of like what often goes on here, great fun but it ain't RVX.
So here's a question or 6 to carry on the conversation. What if the correlational relationship between Alzheimers incidence and APO-A1 levels presents sufficient delay in NexVas AD development such that NexVas PR patients show a virtually zero incidence of Alzheimers? What would that do to an AD milestone agreement or valuation? Would NexVas AD be worth more or less? Would any doctor, knowing of the link between Alzheimers and APO-A1, dare not to prescribe NexVas PR to a patient diagnosed with early Alzheimers? And that implies another question, will NexVas PR be prescribed for anybody with even the slightest risk for CVD and if so, would the market for NexVas AD almost completely disappear? Will NexVas be available to anybody with even the slightest aberration in HDL/LDL ratios, levels, etc? These things, I would think, must be considered right now by the pharmas, UBS and RVX.
And Souk, when I went to post this, I saw your post. I appreciate your argument and it's valid. I respectfully disagree with its likelihood only because the shareholders don't get any cash with such a scenario. Because the risks are then left with RVX, we wouldn't really see our shares trading at higher levels, either. But, in the end, if that's what it takes to get value, we'd have to take it. And, I suppose, there are imaginative ways to get a deal done that could suggest sufficient potential value such that the shares trade at 50% or 2/3 of that potential value. And cash could be dividended out, RVXT spun off as a pubco, etc etc etc.
Whatever the answers, it all bodes well for share price.
And also, Souk, if we can't have a discussion of this sort on this forum then what we're left with isn't worth reading. Please continue to present good argument. If all you want is "Go, RVX, go!!" then include me out, to quote the great Casey Stengel.