ROSIE2023 has asked a serious question. It’s often asked about public companies but in this case the possible answers are very concerning.
Prophetoffactz made a post called “
Moment of truth”. After giving us his regular and irrelevant update about the S&P Biotech ETF, prophetoffactz went on to pump Bioasis and used The Case of The Magic Saltarelli to help make his argument.
In response, ROSIE2023 asked a wondrously simple but huge question that is essentially the essence of the Bioasis story. ROSIE2023 asked, “Then why does salty not own any shares ?” I think that shareholders ought to consider this question in tandem with, “Why is salty still here?”
The answer may be as simple as the question. Dr. Mario Saltarelli, Dr. Deborah Rathjen, and the rest of the BoD (with the possible exception of Hemeon, who does own a lot of shares) may have all along considered that BIOASIS IS TOO HIGH RISK TO INVEST IN - BUT XB3 IS NOT. So Salty didn’t invest and yet he’s still here with xB3.
That would explain why they have invested nothing or little and yet they are still hanging on. The question can be further boiled down. Did Rathjen and Saltarelli ever intend or expect to make a success of Bioasis? I’ve been worried since February and March of 2019 that Rathjen could not or would not make a success of Bioasis. I fought tooth and nail to prevent her appointment. There are many people who know that.
The share price has been hovering between 1¢ and 2¢. By that measure alone, Rathjen, Saltarelli and the BoD have utterly failed shareholders. Did they fail through incompetence or by intention? Did they fail to invest in Bioasis because they knew that Bioasis was going to fail? Did they intend to cause Bioasis to fail?
Bioasis intentionally brought Ladenburg Thalmann (LT) into the picture. LT has continued links with Biodexa, and they brought in all of the financing placees. Whose interests does LT support? After LT came along, Bioasis downplayed xB3, and they did it so obviously that it is sickening. They brought the EGF nonsense in, I believe, to make it look like xB3 wasn’t good enough. I suspect that they may have bought the Cresence stuff to leave something in Bioasis if the xB3 platform could be sold into other hands. Remember, as Evans & Evans pointed out, Rathjen and Saltarelli were to be appointed to the Biodexa board when the deal closed and that was a potential conflict of interest. I should say so.
In other words, Rathjen and Saltarelli presided over the failure of Bioasis and yet were going to follow xB3 into Biodexa. They believe in xB3 but not in Bioasis.
And what about the stance being taken by prophetoffactz? He’s a trader. When a tiny stock is bouncing around in the range of 1¢, 1.5¢ and 2¢, a trader stands to make 50% to 100% on his trades, sometimes more than once a week. If prophetoffactz bought stock at 1¢ a few days ago and sold some at 2¢ then that’s 100% profit. Many of us believe that Prophetoffactz’s opinions serve his own purposes without consideration of shareholders’ interests. Stockhouse has shut down previous aliases of his and has deleted all of his posts on at least two of them. I think there is a good chance that he’s pumping his trades right now, that 2¢ is a windfall for him.
But in the end it must be recognized that Rathjen and Saltarelli were going to follow xB3 to Biodexa in a deal that wiped out Bioasis shareholders. Whether the Midatech deal was going to happen or not, Bioasis shareholders were going to be almost completely wiped out, just as the Midatech/Biodexa original shareholders have been. Biodexa, I would contend, is essentially a private company, all very legally, with all of the new shareholders who were were brought in by Ladenburg Thalmann now owning or on their way to owning over 90% of Biodexa. If Rathjen and Saltarelli didn’t know that about the Midatech deal, then they were either unable to understand the deal or they did understood it, and no matter what case is true, they worked to make the deal happen happen.
The question for me, overall, is whether Rathjen and Saltarelli were so incompetent that they could not make a go of Bioasis, or whether they intended to allow Bioasis to fail so that xB3 would fall into hands that could serve their interests.
I don’t know what was or is in the hearts of Rathjen and Saltarelli. Whether they have been malicious or simply incompetent, they do not deserve the support of shareholders.
I have no dog in this fight now. I have always stated my beliefs. I am always more inclined to the interests of the little guy, the underdog, the shareholders. I don’t care about making enemies. I made an enemy of Rathjen right from the start. The only thing that kept me around for a while was the support of shareholders. It went really south in 2020 when I criticized the Chiesi deal that got $750,000 for each of four LSDs that were getting more than $10 million each up front in previous industry LSD/BBB deals. I think that Bioasis and Rathjen needed money and time and that the Chiesi deal provided both, but at a huge cost to shareholders.
I believe that xB3 works. I believe the Ellipses deal was real but fell of the table when Rathjen clumsily revealed it. That event may have caused a change in the Midatech deal, although LT and The Placee may have had every reason to want the Ellipses deal to go away so that they could acquire control of xB3 far more cheaply. Or did LT or someone else suggest to DrDR to accidentally-on-purpose leak the deal. I have a copy of the leaky presentation. It states that the deal had been done. Did the leak undo it to the benefit of LT, the placees and the Bioasis leaders? (I once said that the Bioasis story would make a good book. Fact or fiction, it would make a good book. The only other things we need are sex and a murder or two.)
xB3, the technology, has never been publicly declared a failure, or even problematic. Rathjen refuted my questions about off-target delivery of xB3 payloads because of the ubiquity of the LRP-1 receptor in the CNS. It pleased me very much that she was unequivocal about that. I believe xB3 works and that people and companies like Armistice want to acquire it.
Nobody tries to acquire something for no reason. People want xB3. If it works as hoped it is worth billions in revenue per year. Even better, that kind of money can be had without heavy R&D investments because many payloads like Herceptin are already well understood. The preclinical and clinical work has to be done but that’s like starting in the middle of a marathon. It’s a far shorter race. And then, add to that the likelihood that most xB3 drugs will treat rare diseases and other CNS disorders for which there are no adequate treatments and you have a high likelihood that most xB3 drugs will be expedited by the FDA. What’s not to like?
I don’t think Rathjen and Saltarelli deserve to be a part of it all. They have failed shareholders by all measurements. Don’t take my word for it. What part of a one-cent share price can be misunderstood?
ROSIE2023’s question gets right to it. Dr. Deborah Rathjen, Dr. Mario Saltarelli and others may not have invested anything much, if anything, in Bioasis because they believe that BIOASIS IS TOO HIGH RISK TO INVEST IN - BUT XB3 IS NOT. Whether they caused the high risk situation at Bioasis by incompetence or malice is an open question.
jd