Retail investors weren't supposed to find it....it wasn't meant for them. It's a trade publication and it may be one of the trump-sized handful of things that this company has done that makes sense.
The company provides the content in the hope of attracting "partners"/institutional investors in biopharma. The question is 1)whether that content will get any serious attention and 2)if it does, whether the partner seeker will find it credible and worth pursuing further.
Of course a legitimate analyst will want to look beyond this little advertisement to assess those things. And in doing so they are sure to note things like this:
From the Ad: "In experiments performed in the laboratory of Ken Rosenthal at Northeast Ohio Medical University, mice were infected with the highly virulent H129c strain of HSV-1, which is uniformly fatal. However, in mice treated with an anti-herpes nanoviricide, viral load dropped by 99.9%, lesion progression was halted, and >85% of the mice survived."
Intriguing stuff. But a quick look at the company's last 10-K will provide a bit of info that the Sponsor chose to leave out of their advertisement...those experiments were performed in 2010. Leading the analyst to the inevitable question, one that many have asked seven years later: So how are the clinical trials going?
Turns out that there's a table in the article that shows the arrow for one of the NNVC candidates completing a stage entitled "IND enabling studies" and tickling around the edge of, but not intruding into, the column entitled "Phase 1,2,3, NDA". It's not for the Rosenthal indication, though...for some reason that one hasn't quite made its way into the "IND enabling studies" stage yet (reminder: seven years later). And no candidates have found their way into the last column, leaving that last column about as useful to an NNVC investor as the note at the bottom that says "Market size estimated $3B-5B".
The point? This good idea...buying some space in a trade publication to establish a presence...will only pay off if the people that it is intended to impress don't look too closely or ask too many questions. Those readers tend to be a bit more discriminating than the typical retail investor.
BTW, given the potential I'll bet an analyst would want to look carefully into the meager coverage that the Sponsor gave to this issue:
"FluCide is a broad-spectrum anti-influenza nanoviricide in preclinical development for both injection and oral delivery."
You can fool some of the people.....
But from the perspective of a retail investor it does have a familiar scent....a little like the one that permeated the atmosphere from the award that the company bought a while back. One wonders how many investors who might have been impressed by that are still around.
I was given that information....I don't know.
