Leah is still listed on TH's websiteMaybe updating the website was her responibility and no one has yet taken it over yet. But it is odd that her now disconnected phone number is what an inquiring potential shareholder would get if they were seeking information about TH. TH needs to get that cleaned up ASAP.
Her departure appears chaotic, as evidenced by her disconnected phone number and name still being on the website. I am not sure what happened exactly but it does not seem to me that there was a happy ending to her time at TH. She may have been fired but it also looks like she may have left without giving any or much notice.
Some pieces of info that may or may not have any meaning:
1.) A few months after Leah joined, a company executive asked me how she was doing in her new role. I said she was doing fine but my sense was this executive was concerned with her performance - but it was only a sense and I could have easily misread that.
2.) A few months back, someone I know had posted my Weekly Report Card on Paul's LinkedIn. Leah contacted this person and asked him to stop doing that as it could cause issues for her. So, she may have already been facing some negative feedback from above and was trying to minimize it.
3.) I heard that TH had told her to look for a new job a few weeks back. I heard this from someone who knows someone who has good connections to TH, so I am the third person away from the original source. I consider this info suspect and can't really verify it. As I noted earlier, it likely has about a 50% chance of being fully accurate and maybe not even that high of a percentage. Info coming from this source has not always been totally accurate in the past. The factt hat she was liking Cybin social media posts in the weeks before her deaparture adds some credence to this report though.
4.) Leah had been at TH since March 2019. While the pandemic certainly made her tenure at TH more difficult than anyone could have expected and while she also improved TH's IR effort in some very meaningful ways, the bottom line for shareholders was still not an especially positive one. Now, I am not sure she can be blamed for that as she may have just been obeying orders from above on many issues or was side-swiped by bad decisions others made (the fiascos with the RBC analyst and with the Canaccord analyst were likely not her fault, for example and the ONO was certainly not her decision).
5.) I know some who have inquired about the situation and they have not heard back from the company.
6.) Her move was a lateral one to a similiarly-placed Canadian drug company, which makes sense since her time at TH was not covered in glory that would have opened the door to a better position for her.
7.) The disconnection of her phone seems like an in-your-face type of move. This was a cell phone number for her which I presume she controlled rather than the company controlling it.
So, it looks like her departure may not have been done on pleasant terms.
None of that is likely very relevant to investors although the number of apparent bad relationships with analysts, investors like myself and maybe even internal staff should be a cause for some alarm. One or two incidences like these are normal but there is a trend here that may indicate there is some rot in the system somewhere.
While the exact nature of her departure may not be very important, the timing of leaving is unsettling. TH now has no dedicated communications effort shortly before it releases key news on the cancer phase 1a trial. Maybe no communications effort is better than a bad one!! Still, if the stock price is going to be optimized, a good IR person and PR person would certainly behelpful. And while Leah may have been asked to leave, we cannot be sure she is not leaving because she does not want to deal with the ramifications of an unimpressive result to the cancer phase 1a trial, the resulting low priced offering to fund NASH and/or explaining to investors why the company went back on its word again and has been utilizing the ATM recently.
The positive scenario for TH is for it to announce compelling preliminary efficacy data for the pahse 1a (among other important data that would give investors reason to believe the future is very bright), the stock price reacts very favorably to that data, they bring on severalnew institutional investors and allow Soleus to top up their position using the ATM at a significantly higher price than now, they start the NASH trial in early January and start the phase 1b trial shortly thereafter. Initial indications of tumor shrinkage from the phase 1b start being reported by the company in April following 4 treatments. Paul sought to overhaul the PR and IR functions now before the good news started flowing so he could get better results.
The negative scenario is there are no signs of preliminary efficacy in the phase 1a trial, the stock does not react or even falls some, the ATM is utilized at a low price and sales through it further depresses the stock price in order to raise money for the NASH phase III and we have to wait until April or beyond to find out if TH-1902 is going to change the world or be thrown in the dust bin. If this is what Leah saw on the horizon, there is good reason for her to have left.
The truth probably falls somewhere in between those two scenarios. Whatever the truth is, we should know it before too long.
And on the issue of whether TH is using the ATM right now, that seems unlikely since trading volume is so low. They would not have been able to raise much money over the last month even if the ATM accounted for half the volume since volume has been so low. They can't be that desperate.