Is There a Case Against xB3? I got an obscene inbox from craighenry this morning. Dispersed among the foul words were reminders from him that he has said for years that xB3 doesn’t work and that recent events prove it. He claims that he and his buddy regardless have always known that xB3 doesn’t work.
I won’t bother posting the names of all the others who claim that xB3 doesn’t work. They regularly do so in wild-eyed bursts here on Stockhouse, but they have no basis for the claim. They all speak with a certainty about Bioasis and xB3 that I cannot do. Neither they nor I have any proof or even evidence of a failure of xB3.
By “proof” I mean that, among other things, I can’t contradict the two scientific papers based on xB3 studies done at Texas Tech and by MedImmune/AstraZeneca. Those were peer reviewed papers detailing studies done by pharmaceutical professionals who must guard their reputations or they will be professionally destroyed in both academia and industry. And there were other papers and reported results from Canada’s National Research Council, UBC, B4B (Scarpa), and others, too many to bother looking up. They all reported success in the delivery of their payloads by xB3 across the BBB - job done by xB3. And remember, xB3 is not a therapeutic. It delivers a therapeutic payload across the BBB and that is its only job.
None of the papers dealt with the worry I posted over two years ago about the off-target delivery of payloads to the LRP-1 receptors on normal brain cells. Longer-term studies are needed to show whether off-target delivery could develop into problems, but that would be an inherent part of any preclinical and clinical studies. That question would be resolved.
Dr. Deborah Rathjen has denied that any such problems exist with xB3.The other CEOs also deny any problems.
Even though Rathjen purposefully and publicly down-played xB3, she nevertheless was selling it to Midatech so she couldn’t very well allow LT, the placees, and Midatech to get all worried about the capabilities and value of xB3. The Midatech deal was all about xB3, make no mistake. How do we know? She was privately touting a deal with Ellipses for xB3-001, and yet she was not telling the public (shareholders) about it. It was put on public record. She was touting xB3, probably under NDAs, to the people who were buying Bioasis.
But then she accidentally leaked the Ellipses deal and lost or cancelled the deal. I suspect that once it was leaked the deal couldn’t be completed because it would show that Rathjen was PUBLICLY down-selling xB3 at the same time she was PRIVATELY touting xB3 to her suitors, LT, the placees and Midatech. (That is important and it ought to be investigated.)
It must also be recognized that Bioasis has done some business deals. They were done with industry professionals who are highly skeptical of new technologies. But Bioasis made the case for xB3 sufficiently that these companies paid a little money to Bioasis and used their own resources to do some work with xB3. I don’t recall that either the payloads or the targets were ever revealed in any of the deals, with the possible exception of Neuramedy with its rather obvious payload.
If any of all of those xB3 projects failed, there has been no indication that xB3 was the cause of the failures. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that the payloads failed in the CNS, which would happen after xB3 delivered them across the BBB and into the CNS. No company has ever reported that xB3 has failed, and they are unlikely to reveal that the payload, their own drug, has failed. There is no public evidence that xB3 licensed drugs have failured.
In the end there is lots of empirical evidence that xB3 works but no empirical evidence that it has failed. That’s a fact. So those who say that Bioasis’s woes are happening because xB3 has failed, that they always knew xB3 was no good, and that recent events have proved xB3 is no good, have no basis, whatsoever, to make the claim of xB3 failure.
So where does that leave us. craighenry, zwerp2000 and others are all spouting mindless blah blah blah. They are not aware that their statements about about xB3 failure make them look uninformed and quick to jump to unsupported (and unsupportable) conclusions. They, as always, destroy their credibility without being aware of it.
What I find interesting is that they can accuse me of all sorts of nefarious activities and yet they cannot believe that the failure of Bioasis could be because of the malice and/or incompetence of the company’s managements. I would think that those who are “in control” of the company would affect outcomes more likely than an opinion writer could.
There is no publicly known serious case against xB3. I think it likely that xB3 is OK and that lots of money will be made from it.
jd