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We'll hear from the company at some point. It would be nice if it was more often but they have their own convoluted schedule. I'm content with waiting because I am not invested here because management is awesome. I'm invested here because I believe the technology has shown enough promise that the company should be worth more than $22M. I know roughly when to expect the data I am looking for so I don't need to really bug the company about it. I will however let them know that promising deadlines and missing them is unacceptable. I see no need for them to have a public strategic review. They generally give an update at the beginning of the year. We'll see what they do this year.
I keep fighting you on it because you seem so set on telling other people what they should do without actually doing it yourself. A prime example of do as I say, not as I do. If you aren't willing to take your own advice stop forcing it on other people.
I know that's not you. You've mentioned in the past you don't hold any shares. My point remains the same. If you think it is so important then you can demand it from the company. Stop telling other people to do it. If they wanted to they would. It's a bit weird you spend so much time telling other people here what to do when you don't even have a dog in the fight. How self righteous of you to think everyone needs to heed your advice.
Are you going to answer my question or are you just going to continue to deflect? Why don't you contact the company and demand a strategic review if you think it is so important?
Why don't you contact the company and demand a strategic review instead of telling everyone else to do it for you? You seem to be the only one really bringing it up so it would make sense that you would be the one to bring it to the company's attention.
If the SP closes below $1 anytime between now and February 9th then they will be delisted. Anytime after that if SP closes below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days they will be given another notice of failure to satisfy a continued listing rule at which point they will have 180 days to regain compliance plus another 180 day extension if granted by Nasdaq.
You are absolutely right that 30M authorized shares at this share price won't get them very far. Obviously the hope is their upcoming news will be enough to to move the share price higher before they need to do a larger offering. Who really knows how that plays out. At this point we can only speculate.
Depending on the results of the PII it's highly plausible. You do realize how dirt cheap this therapy is to manufacture right? The entire PII is only going to cost ~$25M total. Aside from that when they don't need to run a PIII what does it matter what their authorized share count is?
Good thing they don't have 100,000,000 shares authorized to issue.
100%. It's that workable plan that Marker needs to show us though, lol.
Sure, but I think it is disingenuous to use the fact that they have options to cover any open market purchases. The options are part of their compensation package and awarded at the beginning of the year. They don’t get to dictate at what price or make any other changes to benefit themselves. They get them as is and are just getting what is owed to them. Whether they deserve it or not. They still need to have the cash to exercise them.
Below are the split adjusted options that the two major company managers have. Their names link to the SEC filings. Everyone else has lesser amounts but basically at the same exercise price. No one other than these two are active in purchasing any shares.
Juan Vera:
16,000 @ $4.60
14,000 @ $21.20
14,000 @ $32.90
50,000 @ $91.80
All of these currently have exercise prices over the current share price but if he did want to exercise all of them it would cost him $5,373,000. Now, I know Vera has this but that is still a large chunk of cash to be throwing down.
Peter Hoang:
43,000 @ $4.60
43,000 @ $21.20
43,000 @ $30.60
135,985 @ $91.80
Again, all of these currently have exercise prices over the current share price but if he did want to exercise all of them it would cost him $14,878,523. No way Peter has this kind of cash sitting around.
Anyways, my point is that these options don't really matter. More than likely most of them won't even be exercised. Maybe the ones issued last year and the ones that will inevitable be issued this year but Peter is the only one that has enough to really help is overall cost basis and I don't think he has the cash to lock up even if he wanted to.
They get options pretty much every year. You can rant about it all you want but that's part of most companies compensation plans and it is not performance based unfortunately.
Yea, I edited the post. Probably while you were responding. To expand a little though below are all the insiders' split adjusted breakeven points. This does not account for any warrants or options that may have been or will be exercised.
Peter Hoang: $19.38
John Wilson: $11.66
Juan Vera: $11.68
Steve Elms (Aisling Capital): $31.82
NEA: $28
Yea. Form 4s below:
Peter Hoang: 142,857 shares at $1.75 for $250k
Steve Elms (Aisling Capital): 1,142,857 shares @ $1.75 for $2M
Juan Vera: 571,428 shares @ $1.75 for $1M
John Wilson: 1,714,285 shares @ $1.75 for $3M
NEA: 5,714,285 shares @ $1.75 for $10M
Adjusting for the split they need $17.50 share price to break even on these. NEA and Aisling also bought at $4 ($40 split adjusted) in the initial offering done concurrently with the merger so they have an even higher break even price overall.
The problem with removing Peter is that in a roundabout way he was pretty much hand selected by the original Marker owners and NEA. While they can obviously have a change of heart, and probably should put their emotions aside, they seem to have an attachment to him.
Peter, John Wilson, and Juan Vera all sit on the board and I have to assume that none of them would put forth a proposal to oust Peter. Any proposal would then need the approval of all four remaining board members. From those remaining people the only one I could potentially see as even considering it would be Steve Elms as he has the most at stake. The rest are probably just as complicit as management.
I'll have to throw my hat in the ring for board member next annual meeting, lol
The company has referred to the AML trial as a pivotal PII in in their presentations. I don't have links to those as the ones on the website are only archived for a certain period of time. The fact that they are referring to their PII as pivotal is the confirmation that they are trying to avoid the PIII as that is what a pivotal PII will accomplish.
Now I get to backtrack some comments. Yay. While the company is stating that the trial is pivotal technically in their 10K filings they are saying "potentially" pivotal. I didn't find this until right now when I was looking for a link to send you. It is
in a section that I don;t normally read when these filings come out. HERE is the 10k and here is the excerpt from that 10k in question. "We are conducting a Phase 2 clinical trial in post-allogeneic HSCT patients with AML in both the adjuvant and active disease setting under our IND, and this trial may become pivotal pending the results of the interim analysis." So in filings they are being technically correct in their wording and in speaking they are taking some liberties they probably shouldn't be. Add this to the list of knocks on management.
So, I guess now we need to await official confirmation that the trial is indeed pivotal. If it is, then they will get to skip the PIII so long as the results are good. If not, a PIII might be in the future I apologize as it sure seems my past comments on this topic were unintentionally misleading.
I don't think they get the initial $70M investment at the time of the merger without having promising technology. The PI pretty much showed that it is effective. Management just needs to get the damn trials going. Part of the problem is all of the initial PII data is from the active group. This is a group that was heavily pretreated and to be honest the data was not as compelling as the adjuvant group. I personally think plenty of retail investors are not taking this into account. They see this initial data and get upset because they are remembering the PI adjuvant data, not the active. In reality the limited data that has been presented from the PII, which is all active patients, has pretty much matched what we saw in the PI. I've posted it before but I'll post it again anyways. Below is the data we have so far on just the active group:
PI: 8 patients treated, 1PR & 1CR (The PR patient saw enough of a reduction to allow a second cell transplant)
PII: 11 frank relapse patients treated, 0CR
2 MRD+ patients treated, 2 CR MRD-
So the PI had a CR rate of ~12% and the PII had a CR rate of ~15%. Very small sample sizes. For disclosure here I am counting MRD+ patients turning MRD- as CRs because that's essentially what they are.
The only conclusion I can draw is that anyone who is disappointed in the data presented thus far doesn't understand that the trials were split into two groups and we are only seeing data from one of those groups.
Basically my point here is that if you believed that the initial PI data showed promise there has been nothing up to this point for your opinion to change.
If it stays below $1 for 30 consecutive business days then they'll get another delisting notice from Nasdaq. They'll then have 180 days to regain compliance plus another 180 days if an extension is granted. After that they'll rinse and repeat with another reverse split and will promptly be sued into oblivion.
At this point in time you are only a buyer of shares if you believe that the science will prevail. They aren't doing a whole lot to convince people of that beyond the old PI data. This should change as data from the AML trial starts to really roll out, not just a few at a time every few months, and the new trials start.
I know you didn’t ask me, but I am going to expand on this since I’m assuming it was my post you are referring to where I mentioned that the PII AML trial is pivotal which means it can skip PIII.
A pivotal trial is basically just the trial that intends to provide all evidence necessary for the FDA to grant approval. Obviously, this is usually a PIII but PII trials can be designed in a way to provide the FDA with all they need to grant approval. That is what Marker has done with the PII AML trial and they worked with the FDA in the trial design to make sure that it will show everything the FDA wants to see. They can still request a PIII be done but as of right now the intention is for the PII to provide all the evidence necessary for an approval to be granted.
They have ONLY 172 participants in the Phase 2 trial, which seems very, very small for the FDA to declare that a Phase 3 trial is not needed (if the Phase 2 results are good)!
I'm going to start by saying I don't believe they will execute the full deal. At least I certainly hope they don't. My reasoning for this is that they had the same type of deal in place with Aspire Capital that expired in September. It was for $30M and if I remember correctly they only used about $6M of the deal.
That being said, IF they do execute the whole thing for the full $25M (we would need SP of ~$10 for that to happen since the deal does have a limit on shares) it SHOULD be enough cash to take them into Q2 of 2024. If they keep managing their cash position it might make it into Q3 but that's stretching it.
If what I was told is to be believed then the plan is to get the lymphoma trial up and running this quarter so that they can have a data readout by the end of the year. That's all that was said but the implication was clearly that if that data readout impresses and the SP increased then they will do the offering then. To get to that point though they need about $10M-$15M extra cash. The LPC deal can provide this bridge.
They did publicly say last year that they were exploring other options for financing including looking internally at their board. As incompetent as management may seem they know that this LPC deal does not provide them with enough funding. My opinion is that they are still exploring other financing options and did the LPC deal to provide some flexibility. I really hope they don't execute the full deal and like I said earlier I don't believe they will. Best case scenario they come up with better financing and don't execute on any of the LPC deal.
I don't think the new trials are really going to have a major effect on their cash burn. Obviously they will cost money but they will be smaller than the AML trial. Remember the entire AML trial is only going to cost ~$25M of which $15M is funded via grants. I expect the lymphoma and pancreatic trials will come in at maybe half of what the AML trial will cost. So about $10M-$12M if that. It might even be less since these trials should be considerably smaller than the AML trial.
Regardless of the LPC deal and even if they are able to get more funding I fully expect we see a secondary offering this year. I just don't see a way around it. The question is do they make it to the lymphoma readout before they do it. They are playing a dangerous game with their cash position right now.
I think the point Irish is trying to make is that management has definitely made plenty of questionable decisions that have actually contributed to the share price decline. Despite that everyone seems to be locked in on the fact that they said they would release data by the end of last year and they didn't. Obviously this isn't a good way to go about things but this is not the mistake that caused all their problems. It's just the most recent one that is fresh in everyone's minds. Everyone wants to talk about how management is not communicating properly or providing updates in a timely manner but the fact is that it doesn't matter how timely they are with their updates if the updates are garbage.
Maybe if they chose to go after lymphoma first, even despite the hurdles they would have had to clear at the time, or they didn't delay the AML trial to make more process updates without waiting on results from the first process updates they would be in a different position right now.
The main point Irish is trying to make is that if you want to blame the company for something it should be their questionable decisions that put them in this shaky position to begin with. By all means, blame them for whatever you want but despite what people keep saying their poor communication is not the main contributing factor that led to their decline.
The AML trial is a pivotal PII. So it can be approved without the need of running a PIII.
I wouldn't say they are intentionally concealing anything. What we are seeing are the effects of their incompetence.
Agreed. I've tried to remain as optimistic as I can but management has not made it easy. I keep telling myself that I'll be here until the data disappoints as I believe they have something with their technology. If they do indeed get their lymphoma trial up and running this quarter and the pancreatic trial going this year we should have plenty of shots on goal.
Ah. Yes, was missing that. We'll agree to disagree in that I still don't think it's necessary to PR their intention in this case given they put it in effect right at the deadline. If they chose to put it into effect well before the obvious deadline then I would agree that they should PR that. Unfortunately management has a history of incompetence. They have some news that could potentially provide some stability but I also would not be surprised to see the SP fall below $1 again.
They better have something planned. Should have a few options to provide some stability here:
1. Still waiting on AML data that was supposed to be announced last year. (Not holding my breath on this)
2. Dosing of first AML patient with off the shelf therapy.
2. Lymphoma trial should start this quarter. (This IND approval brought in a ton of volume, hopefully the trial initiation brings in more)
I have lost all faith that they will be able to navigate this RS but I do hope I'm wrong.
Companies might sometimes announce their intention but it certainly isn't necessary. It was already disclosed and the timeline is public knowledge. It's been talked about on this very board plenty of times. Everyone that has done even a tiny bit of DD knew it was coming and when.
We only saw the r/s in the filing because they HAD to per the SEC.
If institutions wanted in there is nothing stopping them from buying at these levels. The problem is they don't want in. Management, in their ineptitude, have made sure that the stock is retail driven and it is hurting shareholders.
Agreed. The low float should help with price movement should they have good news to release. The problem is they most likely don't have good enough news to do anything. If they did it should have been released by now. They have plenty of things coming up that could provide some stability but it shouldn't be anything that will be earth shattering.
They did communicate the RS. Everyone saw it coming. HERE is the 8K that was filed after their annual shareholder meeting held on May 24th 2022 in which shareholders approved the reverse split. HERE is the 8K stating that Nasdaq granted them an extension to regain compliance with the minimum bid price requirement. They had until February 13th to get SP over $1 for 10 consecutive trading days. That clearly wasn't going to happen so they put in effect the RS that was previously disclosed to shareholders.
All this being said, there will definitely be more dilution and it has nothing to do with the fact that they just did a RS split and everything to do with the fact that they will be out of funds by August. Something else that they have also disclosed.
Pretty much everything related to share count, LPC deal, warrants, options, have been cut by 10. LPC deal is still just $25M but the maximum amount of shares they can sell under the deal is now ~2.5M. They will more than likely not issue all of these shares. They had the same deal with Aspire capital and barely used it.
Outstanding share count is ~8.4M. Fully diluted I believe it is somewhere between 11.5M-12M. This more than likely won't matter as warrants are set to expire this year and the way the company has been headed it is highly unlikely that the exercise price will be reached.
They won't let it delist. If they were going to do that they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of approving the reverse split. It doesn't take long to initiate the reverse split. The end of January date is because share price needs to be over $1 for ten consecutive trading days to regain compliance. It's not the date they need to effect the reverse split. They technically have until the middle of February.
Without knowing what the company is thinking I am assuming that they saw no CRs. It's the only thing I can come up with outside of them withholding the data to present at a more "opportune" time. I spoke with the company last year and was specifically told that if they saw no CRs in the next data set that they would need to further evaluate. Possible the delay is because before they release the data they want to have their plan moving forward prepared so they can share that at the same time.
They can definitely sit on it. I think the only confusion is people who confuse material information needing to be released in a timely manner with the company needs to tell us every little thing that is happening exactly when it happens.
This is interim data. They are going to have a lot of leeway with how it is released.
Technically accurate but a little misleading. It makes sense to have them listed but the only one that matters right now is the AML trial (NCT04511130). The rest are the BCM sponsored trials. We probably don't see much from the BCM trials as they've already more or less served their purpose which was to see which indication made the most sense to pursue.
I have no clue. At this point, and probably even before this, I think it is fair to not trust any timeline on data releases they issue themselves. They have the data. They are just deciding for whatever reason to withhold it. If they thought the data would be good enough to avoid the reverse split they should have released it by now. I can only hope that they have more news and they've withheld the data to stack with their other news. They dump it all sometime between now and January to try to bring the share price over $1 as a last push or they wait until after the reverse split and hope the news dump is enough to avoid an immediate decline in share price post reverse split.
You can assume whatever you want.
There might be some value in their manufacturing facility but I wouldn't expect it to be much. Wilson Wolf did give them $8M, with the potential for an extra $1M, "in exchange for services relating to Marker’s expertise in the manufacture of cell therapies." That's almost half the current market cap.
Either way, they need to get their trials running full tilt so they can get data. Its been four years and they have data on like 13 patients. That's unacceptable. What's worse is they backed themselves into this corner where they will be in dire need of cash because they chose to keep tweaking their manufacturing process while putting their only trial on hold. They took what should have been a great financing deal and did it with a garbage company in LPC. Also, looks like they won't report the data that they were supposed to, again, and until they do the price will continue to stagnate or decline.
We pretty much know most of the news that is possible between now and the inevitable RS and I don't believe it will be enough to do much for the share price. If the next data set was going to blow anyone away they should have released it already. We should know by the next data release how hard this trial delay screwed the shareholders.
Sorry for the rant. My patience is really being tested right now, lol.