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15M new shares at zero warrant coverage is now about 1% dilution. Personally I don't sweat that level of dilution. How big a worry dilution really is depends on how long it takes to get news of the first RA approval which probably gets a 300-400% pps gain, meaning lowering the dilution rate by 75-80%. How much cash do they need to get to RA approval? Do any of the posters here have even a reasonable ballpark WAG? Maybe 1 or 2 might be qualified to make that guess. Without knowing that figure I take it that the dilution rate math works out to far less than 'massive dilution' unless they need to raise well over $100M at current share price or lower esp if they have to go back to 100% warrant coverage but we've been far from seeing that. The wailing sounds to me a bit like poor arithmetic skills or concern trolling.
I don't think it's in management's or shareholders' interest to have management predicting time lines for RAs to act even if they could be sure when marketing applications can be submitted and note that they confirmed that being able to apply in the UK depends on first getting the MIA approved. It would feel wonderful to be told we can expect to get first RA approval to get applied for in X months and approved in Y more months but I don't think it's realistic to imagine this management team will give even a ballpark deadline for the same for various reasons. And no management except maybe a Mr E. Musk type is ever going to brag that they are negotiating with financial institution nor with a BP partner before they can actually announce a deal. IMO it's massively naive to expect otherwise.
Awfully nice of Advent to take payroll payment in NWBO stock instead of cash.
Advent is carrying 30-40 highly skilled workers at Sawston IIRC. Not sure how many have advanced degrees including some PhDs who are in high demand. Payroll alone would be pushing 4M even in the UK wouldn't you say? Money talks and to me that says a lot about how soon they will be in production.
You'd be surprised what you can learn by actually reading the SEC filings.
Can you please tell me how I can find this complaint? TIA.
He sure had his iron backbone on display this AM, LOL.
First, it's absurd to impune the motives of those long-term longs like myself who happen to disagree with you for principled reasons. BTW you wrote about me the below which 1. don't presume to speak for me, please and 2. I don't even know what you're trying to say.
For 131I-omburtamab, Serious Adverse Events (“SAE”) was found in 40.6% of the patients and were mostly related to myelosuppression.
Dc-vax-l is unquestionably safe. Do some more Dew Diligence before making nonsense comparisons.
For 131I-omburtamab, Serious Adverse Events (“SAE”) was found in 40.6% of the patients and were mostly related to myelosuppression.
Yes, Jerry is a gentleman and I appreciate that. On open social media these days that is very nice to have! As for how different people interpret facts, history etc. of any public figure and his/her decisions, dealings etc. there will often be different knowledge of background and extreme divergence of opinions even about well-known facts. That's in the nature of an open society and it's what makes a market in stocks.
Do you realize that when Powers was recruited as CEO of NWBO she already owned Cognate and she gave as a condition of her taking the job as NWBO's CEO that NWBO would use Cognate? So Cognate was a priority for her but the way you put it distorts the fact that her interest in Cognate completely predated her becoming CEO of NWBO. It's true that this created a conflict of interest but the truth is that her interest in Cognate predated her interest in NWBO and that the relationship was accepted by NWBO's BoD and retiring CEO when they recruited Powers. It's quite possible that no other candidate for CEO came forward because the odds of NWBO succeeding likely seemed very low at that time, but I'm far from familiar enough with the history to claim that I know that for certain.
Another point you'll never talk about: Powers gave up her interest in Cognate in a management-led buyout financed by some 3rd party(ies). I don't think we know the buyout terms but we do know that a few years later, Cognate was purchased by CRL. IIRC the purchase price was $800M. From where I'm sitting it appears certain that Powers lost the opportunity for far greater financial gain if she had just held her interest in Cognate another year or two than she realized in selling when she did, and I'm sure that she did so to get out of the conflict of interest, which admittedly was not a great situation WRT corporate governance.
It's certainly a fact that she benefitted from owning Cognate while they grew their business (how largely Cognate's business success depended on NWBO alone I would not know but obviously they built a very successful business besides with NWBO alone) on the base of supplying NWBO for their trials and other activity. However, it's also certain that she gave up the huge additional profit that was realized when Cognate was sold on to CRL. Since you want to focus on how much Cognate profited from their relationship with NWBO while building a very successful business including gaining valuable contracts with other companies, I'm sure you overlook the fact that she gave up several hundred millions of larger profit that she could have had if she had held onto ownership of Cognate another couple of years. You obviously ignore that fact because you want to paint her as a terrible villain but I think you distort the true picture.
When it comes to NWBO retaining the services of Advent Bioloservices I'm sure that the prime reason that NWBO ex-Powers went along with that in spite of repeating the financial conflict of interest due to Power's personal stake in Advent, was the fact that Mike Scott is a genius and super experienced in cellular technology, with 30 years experience and a professorship, and BTW I believe he already had a team including other cellular science PhDs. Do you really think it would have been easy for NWBO to assemble a similarly qualified team of experts in the technologies so key to their success? I'm sure it would not, especially guys like Mike Scott are few and far between! This is Scott's bio:
Mike brings a wealth of experience to Advent Bioservices, having held several senior clinical and scientific positions within the NHS and in academia. He has spent 30 years in the field of cellular therapy and has co-authored more than 90 papers. Mike has Masters’ degrees in haematology and immunology and his PhD was in the area of stem cell biology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists and holds a visiting Professorship at Anglia Ruskin University.
Of course it has, which is why it seemed dumb to cite it as remarkable. It is remarkable to run like crazy on Friday and then hold the gains so far today. Though folks getting worked up on the MB on the weekend often finds particularly over-enthusiastic buying on Mondays.
Exciting stuff what not to like on a day like Friday! But OTOH slow and steady is possibly more reliable proof of a sustainable uptrend. Anyway remarking on intraday moves is sort of a mugs game in general, I fully agree with that.
Volume a bit anemic tho. But just holding onto the amazing gain on Friday is impressive so far. Well that did not feel like a mere flash in the pan, or the all too usual panic buying run to be followed by body slam.
funny that you made a big deal 'jedi mind trick' out of it today then when it's BAU. Painting the tape at the close has been painting it down more often than up too. I'm sure you know that, too.
That has been the pattern, over-enthusiastic buyers coming in at the open bidding up the shares for example every day last week. You must not have been paying attention.
Biosect, you are certainly right in the distinction between trading shares on the open market and buying shares directly from the company. How much that matters for insiders buying I'm not really sure of.
But I think that you are mistaken about how you read the definition of who is an insider. Namely I think that you parsed the following sentence incorrectly (yours is a perfectly logical parsing, just not the correct one).
"Insider" is a term describing a director or senior officer of a publicly-traded company, as well as any person or entity, that beneficially owns more than 10% of a company's voting shares.
It's clear that you parsed the sentence making "that beneficially owns more than 10% of a company's voting shares." distribute back to "a director or senior officer " But I'm pretty sure that is wrong and in fact we need to read a hard stop after the end of the bold phrase. So the 10% owner phrase doesn't get distributed back to the other side of "...as well as..". I.e. Any director or senior officer is an insider regardless of how many voting shares he/she may or may not own.
I'm not an expert on insider participation in offerings. I would point out again that the principle at stake is different between open market trading and buying directly from the company. In the former case, the other side of the trade is damaged by an uneven playing field. In the latter, it's a matter of the company's interest vs the buyer of the offering. In this particular case there had been an open offer of C preferred shares to qualified investors on the same terms - a small discount to market, no warrants. JJ was not a 10% holder and as an outside director, he was probably ring-fenced off from knowing anything about any material deals under consideration. It's possible that a compliance officer or committee might review and give the green light that if there was a deal in the works that JJ had no knowledge and/or else that any company deal was removed enough in time. I admit that my knowledge is not complete wrt insider participation in offerings.
This is a subtle point regarding stock being offered directly by the company vs transactions in the market. A direct buyer is allowed to buy shares directly from the company with non-public knowledge e.g. something disclosed under an NDA. At the same time, you can't have somebody with non-public knowledge gained from the company buying from other secondary open market participants because the integrity of the public market must be maintained. This means that buyer and seller have to be on the same level in terms of info released or not yet released by the company. Within the public market for shares, all participants are supposed to be operating under the same information released by the company (though a buyer or seller in the open market is free to find out anything using DD and in that way having an information advantage - information advantage between parties on the open market just cannot be secret information released by the company to only one party of the transaction). One might know more than the other but legally that must only through discovery of publically available information.
However it is a different situation when the company sells shares directly to a buyer in a public offering or by a buyer making a buyout bid. In that case the company is allowed to give information that is not public to the direct buyer. Take the case of a buyout - the buyer will surely need to examine the books and anything else, and hence can have any information not yet known in the public market. They are allowed to do that under an NDA. The purpose of the NDA is to ensure info does not leak to only some participants in the public market. In the public market all participants must have the same amount of information available (regarding what info is released by the company). But a party who is going to buy out the company is allowed to have non-public information before making a buyout offer. And that's OK as long as information is equal between the selling company and the buyout buyer. The buyout buyer doesn't have to be on equal information footing as those buying and selling in the open market.
This is subtle point that I'm sure not everybody understands. Not sure my explanation is crystal clear - the point is that the public market is one market and any direct sales by the company to a private buyer is a different market and the information rules are different.
Again, IMO it was and still is way too early to give management bonuses equal to more that 10% of the outstanding shares in the company, based on what? I've been as optimistic (and forgiving of this taking forever because I have no choice) as anybody, but really what do we have as of now let alone as of YE 2020 when these bonuses were granted? We have nothing but bliind trust, OK an educated guess that they can get approved. Even with approval there is a lot of execution still ahead to be negotiated. So far, we're not at any proof-positive endpoint and it's taken a hell of a long time to get here.
Longs should be a lot more hard-headed about very rich compensation before we've actually got the damn goods delivered. Are you all ready to give management another 10% of all shares outstanding when they finally get RA approval and then another 10% when they prove they can actually ramp up and deliver product to all patients who want it? It's a lot more likely than not that they will expect further risk rewards based on how much they've demanded for so little actually in our hands to date (again the bonuses are for as of YE 2020 for Pete's sake).
This is just way too generous, way too soon. The 2020s are not a decade where management should be getting prepaid for results on the basis of hard work alone and promise of eventual revenues with actual delivery still remaining to be seen. Well clearly from all the wild-eyed enormous expectations, too many longs have been counting hope of huge numbers of chickens far too long. Especially those who have been around more than 5 years should have modest expectations until we start treating patients and getting paid for it, and I can't see rewarding management more than 10% of the company because we hope they will make us a lot of money eventually. I never got paid any bonuses for developing products before they were actually available!
Why oh why are the bonuses not 'pay as we go' when our money is still at risk with the real and actual value remaining to be demonstrated? Waay too much blind trust imo and way too willing to heap on 8-digit bonuses as prepayment for what still has not even started to pay off.
Massive victory of ego over compassion. Well it's pretty clear the guy was always a massive ego. LL would not write this sloppy crap about somebody else's work in 1000 years, I'm sure of that.
Wow, you really had your dancing shoes on there. Just kidding and definitely not meant as a negative, all your arithmetic one sum after the other left me dizzy and I may have to read it another 2-3 times to feel like I follow you 100% down at the nitty-gritty level. Seriously you do a hell of a good job with the details in making the crucial point about rGBM that kinda kicked Stuppy Sensi in his 80-year-old patooty all the way back to NVCR Palookaville IMO.
rGBM and the plus 7 more out of every 100 5-year survivors is a small but enormous number when we're talking flesh and blood patients with left alive with really good QOL instead of being dead before 2 years are out to me are huge trumps over the BS (and frankly the 6% in the non-DcVax cases doesn't seem nearly as real in more than KM curve reality. Yeah, I know the 13% is also KM but it has a heck of a lot more solid basis in real patients alive not just in theory than the supposed 6% does!).
Some folks love to make any argument they can that they think proves something but the patients are real people facing some of the worst odds anybody ever does against the very grim reaper. It's not some academic exercise!!!
JAMA is 3rd party verified via peer review by experts not associated with the trial that they indeed have a very important treatment of large value. Without that all they have is assertion by the company and by the PIs or experts hired by the company to state that the company does have large value from a treatment that works, and is not pure speculation with only the company's own assertions as 'proof' of value.
Did you read the filing? It bases its argument completely on the JA.
Not when the previous reward was way, way over the top and would be a reward for presiding over the massive dilution and then pps through 2020 stuck at or near rock bottom!
Approve these awards then wait and see whether or not they give themselves even more for 2019-2022? Not me! As of YE 2020 IMO oversized rewards were not merited by any stretch of the imagination.
Again these option awards are for 2018-2020, not this year. I ask you what value they added to the shares through the end of 2020? Check the stock chart to refresh your memory.
The exec comp isn't even about 2022 nor even 2021. This is about $27M worth of options to the top 2 for 2018-2020. IMO just not enough progress after 95% of shareholders' equity was crushed out of the stock and not yet recovered as of year-end 2020. It's about massive option awards at the complete bottom price of the shares. That collapse of the shares may not in all fairness be only management's fault but they still ought to be held to account for that rather than be so obscenely well rewarded, IMO.
I will vote No on exec comp but I'm sure it will get approved. Then I fully expect more large awards to be granted for 2021-2022. Maybe not but it will be a big surprise to me if they don't come back to the well. IMO don't reward non-performance. If and when they do get RA approvals we can reward them then rather than awarding a gazillion options granted at the historic bottom share price which they ought to take some responsibility for!
Excellent point. With minimal revenue how can you establish anything like a 'true' value? The only possible heuristic (formula for best guess) would be where the market established a relatively flat line over time. Which does nothing for the company trying to establish higher value across an upward spike which the MMs putatively broke down through illegal acts.
To get any large damages the only question could be whether or not the company would be allowed to argue and then be able to convince a jury that the behavior is so reprehensible and damaging to the public good that only large damages can deter the bad behavior or negligence of the MM company in allowing their people to break the law and cause harm to public companies. Probably a super huge lift.
It seems certain that the only really big thing to gain is convincing the MMs to knock it off or do it less going forward. JM guess as a non-lawyer.
In a jury trial unless damages are capped, AFAIK there is no telling what a very skilled litigator might convince is needed to properly send a message to miscreants, especially when they have been trying to destroy a company working to provide relief for GBM patients and even giving some of them 5 plus year survival - practically a cure for a few.
I dunno, maybe damages could be capped quite low, but would that also apply to punitive damages? I'm not sure whether or not the MB Savant Esqs. have spoken in that regard.
So you think proper dosage is a big issue in ph 3 clinical trials? I don't think so. I'm no great expert but I think that ph 3 trials are assumed to be done using optimal doses.
I agree that discussion here is not going to shift voting numbers. I don't understand your math though. $ numbers adding 2018 and 2020: LP $24M, LG $14.5M. Please explain how you get $600k p.a. If they have served 15 years then LP got equal to more than $1.5M
every year and Les $1M per year. Note that these figures increase the years when the pps fell from $5 to 0.25 (actually .15 at rock bottom), in other words a 95% loss of equity to all shareholders. What happened to taking responsibility? Management got all the bonuses for all years if you look at it that way, they got well rewarded when they destroyed stockholder equity and also perfectly timed awards when the stock was at rock bottom. I don't see anything fair nor reasonable in this, regardless of how much the options will prove to be worth eventually if and when we succeed. Frankly it makes my blood boil when I think about it.
An additional concern I have is that the options plan remains in force, hence the BoD in its wisdom could still allocate 20% of count of shares added since 2020 to the options pool and then award the lions share to Linda and Les again. Shareholders will not stop that but just maybe if enough voted as a protest vote against the options awards this time it would function as a shot across the bows.
When the pool was filled to the 20% level I called Les and complained and he gave the excuse that they need options available to attract any new executive talent. Yeah, right, in fact they just gave them to Linda and Les.
I agree this timeline is extremely likely. By my calculations NWBO can be quite profitable from marketing in the UK alone, but once patients in the UK have access IMO it will be impossible for the FDA to deny US patients and doctors access to DcVax therapy.
A lot of these assertions are baseless. It's as though this large insider buy cannot possibly be allowed to be a simple case of JJ, a director, investing $600k because he believes that NWBO will be successful. It's as though nobody associated with NWBO can be admitted to be acting in good faith. Anything and everything that happens has to be turned into accusations that NWBO is not real, it is only LP inventing fake treatment for GBM for profiteering etc. Forget the fact that her Dad died of GBM, and that DC Vax is clearly successful and important in the clinic as witnessed by many leading neuro-oncologists who say that Dc-vax will extend many lives and offer an increasing number (as more is known about combination therapies) many more years of high-quality living.
DcVax is an important element of major progress treating GBM. The neuro-oncologists know that (Dr. Williams and his cohort are NOT brain surgeons). It will get approved.
Large bonuses had been awarded in 2018, those awarded in 2020 were described as covering 2018-2020. Maybe the BoD knew a heck of a lot more than we did in what had been accomplished but my experience was to have had stock I originally bought for a few dollars crammed down to .25 - not totally bad because I wasn't that deeply invested and could then buy a much larger stake at bargain basement prices. But the point is that we were far from having any proof that management was adding much shareholder value even by YE 2020 and progress had been and continued for the next 2 years to be excruciatingly slow.
Importantly the option awards represented significant dilution to my own position and being granted when they were, before any value to us shareholders was yet to be demonstrated convincingly to any degree, those bonuses were IMO excessive and unearned,
If NWBO fails to prove successful, the options might not be worth anything, however if NWBO succeeds and gets to being taken out at a good price they will be worth a fortune. I will also make a lot of money in that case but management will be super wealthy and it will come out of my fair share of the buyout proceeds. IMO by any stretch of the imagination those bonuses before any value had accrued to the shareholders were very excessive.
We should not act as a rubber stamp for everything management does esp when it comes to granting themselves super rich rewards.
Wow, a lot of work to extract all the info from the talk, thanks! Saves me listening a second time to confirm the salient points.
It's clear to me that flaskworks will be a huge part of expanding the mfg capacity greatly and very cheaply and will be a part of the successful commercialization of DcVax as the new SOC for GBM. I don't however, know anything about what the formal process is for proving equivalence to the vaccines made by the current semi-automated process. I assume that will have to be a follow-on to the currently in-progress MIA.
Well the most effective falsehoods contain a grain of truth. Personally I agree that Linda and Les took way too much way too soon when they got the BoD to award themselves $17M and $10M bonuses respectively in the form of low-priced options in 2020. For sure that action was completely different from paying cash bonuses but then the stock was still languishing at .35 and here we are even 2 years later and the stock price is no longer .35 but we don't yet have solid proof in the form of RA marketing approvals even applied for let alone approved.
IMO those outsized bonuses were not yet earned, far from it. Hence of course I will be approving the increase in share authorization to 1,7B shares (I would never try to cut off their ability to raise money via equity issuance when they don't yet have revenue coming in - that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face), but I will not vote to approve any of the bonuses i.e, I will vote no on propositions 3-5.
IMO it can't be denied that there has been some profiteering by management (the value of which to be clear, can only really be taken out only if and when NWBO succeeds).
The very basis of all this speculation is wrong. The 10-k filed in March of 2021 disclosed that they had changed the protocol in 2020. The entire purpose of the 10-k is to disclose what happened in the 4th quarter and the entire prior year, NOT what they intend to do going forward.
Exactly, of course great combination results put pressure on the approval of the monotherapy. The trials are not an academic game, they are all about providing patients with weapons to fight the disease and live longer and even cure some of them.
Musella is well known in medical, patient, and government communities to be extremely well informed about GBM. Nobody who has any knowledge of GBM patient advocacy in the US would scoff at his expertise.
And Pazdur totally supports a new paradigm altogether on supporting and accepting cancer trials. I'm sure that NWBO had long been in talks with him and others at the FDA. Dealing with DC bureaucrats is what Powers and Les have 80 years of experience between them doing and precisely what they brought to the table when they became CEO and Sr VP of NWBO.
Should be easy to see by updating a posted post. I've been seeing it on my windows PC under Chrome.