This board would have to file a 13D if we were one entity... so I agree that he should if he hasn't already! We are above 10%... at the current pace a few months' worth of trading volume

Anyone is following CADL?

I thought their P3 prostate cancer data alone would support a higher valuation... IIRC they raised money at around $6, this gave them runway into 2026 and stock went up all the way to $14... P2a NSCLC data seems reasonable although not out of the park. Now it is back in the $5 range. Any insights?

Any thoughts on the importance/value of oral drugs for this indication? I know several people on weekly/biweekly injectable drugs (like Repatha), and it doesn't seem that much more difficult than taking a pill a day. So my reason to invest in VKTX would be that subcutaneous VK2735 seems quite good.

The first question from GS asked about the number of patients infused so far this quarter and they said they would not be disclosing this metric. However near the end of the call when they were asked about patients infused in Q4 they were forthcoming with the number.


The (after hours) market seems to agree with that.

Any thoughts on VKTX? I didn't hear anything new in the call that would justify increased pessimism... I understand that GLP-1 sentiment is down, but that seems to be more than reflected in the price. Not to mention the rest of the pipeline... I have read the comments after their JPM non-news presentation, so I am wondering what the experts here think about the market reaction since then. TIA!

FYI, I sold all my RVNC shares in a Fidelity Roth account at 3:57pm with a 3.65 limit (so I wouldn't have to worry about this account getting paid) and the order was filled at 3.66! Size was higher than a similar order for 50,000 shares on Schwab that was filled at 3.65. That is significantly better execution on Fidelity! The highest price I see in trades around this time is 3.655, so almost looks like Fidelity ate a couple hundred dollars on this transaction. Strange...

Now have to wait and see how long it takes until my remaining shares get paid.

Answering my question here... there is a 0.0002674 exchange fee per share on the sale, so unless one gets at least 3.6503 execution, it is better to wait until closing tomorrow. As a retail investor I cannot specify a fractional cent limit.

I wonder if buyers that are paying 2.655 today (also there have been some trades at 2.66) could be shorts covering or closing other hedges, who if they had waited until tomorrow might have faced fees higher than 0.005 per share to close their positions.

I don't know about biggest, but certainly my costliest investing mistake...
Any reason not to sell today? I have not tendered any shares and this way I get the money a day early...
Updating the previous version of this message, on 1000 share trades Schwab gives me 3.6505, but on 50,000 shares I got 3.6500, so I don't see a way to get a better price, even though several trades go through at 3.655...

I think anyone that acquires RVNC should separate the therapeutic part and sell it as it would be worth more without being tied to aesthetics. This should about cover the EV of the acquisition. Then they can maximize the value of the aesthetic part.

PE crew behind Crown would probably be better for the first part, but I think Teoxane would be better in the second part.

I think Crown would still pay $6.66 if they had to, but once they knew they could squeeze RVNC, they did. All Foley cares about at this point (if he is not in cahoots with Crown) is his separation package.

Agreed. My point was that since there are no open market insider purchases, either there is non-public information preventing them from trading, or their view of the valuation must have changed...

Agreed. Exercising and paying the tax liability with cash is obviously equivalent to an open market purchase of the same number of shares, as the exerciser could turn around and immediately sell all the shares and have (after taxes) additional cash equal to the current market price of the shares. So he/she exchanges cash for share ownership at the market price. If the options are not expiring, in theory (and probably only in theory) that can be more bullish than an open market purchase as the effective cost is the market price plus the option premium for the remaining time of the option.

That said, all the exercise-and-hold transactions were quite old... the most recent was in February 2024 (stock in the teens I believe), and one before that was April 2023 (stock in the low 30s if I am not mistaken). So while clearly a bullish signal then, if they didn't change their perception of value, one would expect heavy buying in the recent prices. Unless, of course, there are M&A discussions that prevent them from doing that (one hopes).

120k

I hope you are right... I acquired 2/3rds of my RVNC shares in the low 3's, which I am still holding, but on a dollar basis most of my position was acquired in the 6-9 range, and some in the 16+, and those shares were sold in late December for the tax loss...

I concur. That said, I think this might have also been the case for RVNC as of early December and see how that went . Maybe we should have contacted Teoxane before the EOY tax selling...

BTW, none of my ENTA shares has been borrowed, unlike the case for a significant portion of my RVNC shares. Maybe because I acquired my position in December, after the heavy shorting...

Happy New Year to everyone, this board has been very informative!

Thank you. This makes sense. If anyone has the expertise to assess the merit of that claim please do chime in!

There are two reasons cited for why the '953 patent cannot claim priority date from the '048 provisional: (1) the change from C2 to C1 (which ENTA argued was correcting a typographical error) and (2) "the disclosure of a broad genus in the ‘048 Provisional fails to provide written description support for the narrowed genera of compounds in the ‘953 Patent."

While there is plenty of explanation in the decision about why the court rejected the argument that (1) was due to a typographical error, I did not see much discussion of (2). Can someone explain what (2) is about and whether if on appeal the typographical error argument is accepted, could (2) still derail the priority date claim to '048?

I agree that this patent is not the primary reason to be long here, but if PFE was found to infringe it would be a major positive for the stock.

Thanks for the response. Can you (or anyone) handicap the probability of eventually reversing on the typo? It seems they had several opportunities to correct, and they corrected some instance(s) but not the one in question. If they eventually lose because of that, would they have a malpractice claim against their patent law firm?

Even if the question of the typo has a reasonable chance of success for ENTA, doesn't the finding about anticipation (which seems well argued) make this moot?

FWIW, my derm KOL contacts tell me that based on feedback from other derms at recent conferences Daxi seems to be doing OK. For instance there was an injector conference this weekend in New York, and when asked who was using Daxi in their practice, barely any hands went up last year, but this year about half the attendees raised their hand. I am told there were about 200 attendees, most non-KOL doctors. As to why, what was mentioned was that the new pricing makes sense and that people are figuring out how to use the toxin. Seems in-line with what Soma was reporting from the West Coast.

By the way, they were surprised when I told them that RVNC says that therapeutic introduction is struggling. They are not neurologists, but they agreed that given the clinical benefit and the insurance coverage this should be an easy sell in therapeutic. They thought the PE company behind Crown will make a bundle...

So I am really puzzled...

I think a lot of this is CYA b.s. because Foley and the RVNC management team botched the execution... We have discussed forever the mistakes in the aesthetic market, and I am willing to give them some benefit of the doubt on that, but when we get "(iii) the slower than anticipated commercial trajectory of DAXXIFY® in both the cervical dystonia and glabellar lines indications, ..." when they have a clearly superior approved therapeutic product in a market with an unmet patient need, that is (another) sign of incompetence.

I didn't think they could screw up the therapeutic market, and this was the basis of my investment thesis, but apparently they did. And I will pay for it (dearly)... I thought that selling the therapeutic business to a pharma would be their hail Mary, but in retrospect I should have exited as soon as I saw who they hired to run that side of the business.

Go to dictionary.com. Type in "c-o-u-n-t-e-r-o-f-f-e-r" (without the dashes).
You will get:
"counteroffer
[ koun-ter-aw-fer, -of-er, koun-ter-aw-fer, -of-er ]
noun
an offer or proposal made to offset or substitute for an earlier offer made by another."

The current breakup fee is too small to make a difference in that type of scenario.

Any thoughts on why we haven't seen any interest from anyone other than Crown for either the whole business or the therapeutic part?

What baffles me is that nobody has stepped forward to make a bid for the therapeutic uses of Daxi. Given the clear clinical benefit and approvals, this alone should be worth to a Big Pharma significantly more than Crown is offering for RVNC, and should be easy to monetize. Actually I won't be surprised if Crown acquires RVNC, if they then sell the therapeutic piece to BP for more than they paid for the whole company. But how come nobody has stepped in here with an offer?

Expectation that the therapeutic part has substantial value was a big component of my investment thesis, but it seems that I was wrong... which has made RVNC my biggest investing mistake...

Fully agree. We should learn more from the tender docs and filings when they come out.

Another bid may still come in--they are not allowed to solicit it, but I believe they can provide DD info to a potential bidder. However based on how close RVNC trades to $6.66, and the pricing of the longer term calls and puts, the market seems to expect this transaction to go through.

This is a fire sale, and makes no sense to me unless there is some disaster we don't know about or this is a sweet deal where top RVNC management reloads in incentive shares and does great at the eventual sale/IPO at 5x.

I hope not! I certainly welcome Dew's (and everyone's) ideas.
[OT]Speaking of which, anyone has an opinion on VRCA? My derm contacts (who were Mohs surgeons before getting into aesthetics) don't think much of their molascum product, think they will have reimbursement issues with warts, but think if their P2 results hold up to multi-year followup, the BCC product can succeed as a first line treatment before Mohs surgery. That could be a huge market, but the company seems a mess financially, so a big dilution seems inevitable...

Of course. The board has been very useful, and while this investment was a fail for me, the opinions expressed here by informed posters were helpful and encouraged me to add to my position in the low 3's, as a result substantially reducing my losses.

I think I made two main misjudgements in evaluating this investment:
1. I should have analyzed daxxi as a new drug, with the corresponding introduction challenges
2. I should have assigned a higher probability to poor execution.

I still don't get the outcome, given that aesthetic use is trending the right way, CD *has* to be a success given the shortcomings of existing treatments, and milestone payments are expected soon. How can they be running out of money so bad they had to do a fire sale? And Crown? How come someone like Galderma doesn't offer $10 at this point? Something seems off here...

I think this explains why insiders didn't purchase any shares at the sub-$3 prices. They must have been shopping RVNC around, probably since the last raise, and finding no takers. Seems they don't believe their story to cashflow break-even, and any raise will be highly dilutive.

RVNC should be worth twice that much to a bigger industry player, and I am hoping this is Foley's way to shake the tree. I am not tendering my shares and hope that if less than 50% are tendered, there will be pressure to increase the offer. On the other hand, this could be a major distraction to their execution, just as we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

If termination fee is $28.7M, it wouldn't deter a competing bid if one were to materialize...

That would promote CD from #3 to their lead indication according to their corporate presentation. They still claim P3 for CD will start in 2024, but last P2 patient was dosed in July 2022, so as Dew has pointed out they seem to have de-prioritized CD given RVNC's stellar data. Given that they are practically insolvent that P3 is unlikely to happen.

I don't think ABP-450 was seen as a serious threat in the therapeutic market, but every little bit helps...

Does anyone remember if there is anything in the covenants of the Athyrium loans that can trigger a repayment demand given the current stock price?

He needs to figure out how to disseminate techniques that work to injectors. I keep hearing from KOLs that for some patients duration is inconsistent across the face muscles. For instance a patient may start seeing movement in the frontalis before the glabella. Then the patient comes in for a free touchup (these practices charge by the area and not by units). This means the doctor has an appointment that doesn't produce revenue, and the patient has to make an extra trip. Based on what soma has written, this is likely because these doctors haven't figured out how to adjust dosing off-label for areas other than the glabella. No easy solution here as RVNC cannot market off label. They need to get the injectors that have figured that part out to disseminate the information to their colleagues.

I have been thinking a lot why I have done so poorly on this investment, and I believe my biggest mistake was to think of Daxi as another toxin instead of (as someone has already said) a new drug. A better drug, but not another toxin like Jeuveau...

Correct and I find this puzzling... This seems to be one of the lingering negative effects of the premium price launch strategy.


Big medspa chains are in a different category but with the KOLs, other doctors, PAs, NPs the practices where these doctors work are among the largest dermatologist users of toxins.

Yes, if every injector used 30% daxxify. But there are about 10 other doctors in their practices that do not seem to use it much, so my guess is if you looked at total toxin purchases for these practices it would be 6-10% Daxxi, with Botox about 30%, Jeuveau about 30% and rest 20% or so (by dollars, which would make Jeuveau the largest in terms of use).

The info I am getting from my East Coast KOLs is similar to Boraborak's. They tried it on more than half their toxin patients, and about half of those stayed on it, so about 30% of their toxin use is Daxxify. Their schedules are full so they get few new patients, so in terms of within-practice growth there was not much change in Daxxxify units Q4 to Q1, which amounts to small growth as most other toxins were a bit down Q-over-Q. Growth could have come from new physicians in their practices adopting, and they haven't seen that. They don't have a good explanation for that, other than the launch was a failure, and these doctors are too busy to give it another look until they get new information from sources they trust.

I am puzzled at the current share price. Assuming there is not some Valeant-type mess about to be unveiled, it could reflect that analysts and short sellers get negative info from the channel. Also there is a lot of turnover, as stated in many messages. That said, these doctors like their new reps that they've had since January more than the old ones. I made 3 very substantial purchases at 3.30/3.31 on Thursday, and given that they executed within minutes and without much price movement, there must be a lot of non-retail investors willing to sell or short at these prices. FWIW, I have not seen any of my shares being lent to shorts, which is unlike what happened with Valeant (which I bought after it already was 90% down from its highs).

As you suggest that would take a lot of time and money. And without a trial, there is no data to publish on other areas.


Exactly. Revance did not handle this part well, and I think it is still one of their biggest problems. The information on how to inject properly other areas is now available if you know where to search, but most of the (small number of) doctors I speak to haven't done this... more like borak's reports rather than soma's. These MDs (who btw were part of Prevue and I think some participated in Sakura 3) get their information from conferences, publications etc rather than message boards, realself or social media. I don't know how representative that is, but it concerns me.

Wall Street is pretty good with channel checks, so I think you could be right about Q1. Almost I would rather have that be the explanation for the low SP rather than something more fundamental.

However I don't see insolvency as a major risk given the increasing success of their filler line. With the $3billion valuation I can understand (but don't agree with) the profligate spending... obvious to anyone that has been at functions in their Nashville HQ... Now they will have to seriously cut down on expenses, and the filler revenues should keep them alive even if Daxi takes a long time. What is your insolvency scenario?

I do not believe RVNC could do that given that approval was only for glabella. Physicians like Soma who figured out the right way to inject other areas could share their protocols/methods in conference presentations, social media etc and I believe Revance should have done more to encourage that, but they would still need not to cross the FDA line... Tbh, given that this is definitely a challenge, I was disappointed that I saw nothing like that at the AAD conference in San Diego last month.

While I agree with soma that the last tranche is a high cost way to raise funds, so was the equity raise at these levels. Given the even higher cost of running out of funds, I would expect RVNC to draw the last $150M if they can. I think the $100M raise was either done to enable drawing the last tranche, or because they realized they would not be able to do that, so they had to immediately find an alternative. If they don't draw, of course they will give soma's explanation... which I wish would be true (as it would signal high confidence in revenue growth) but I doubt it...

You mean revenue, right?
If they don't get the 3rd tranche I think they can still make it if they cut costs and come close to the more optimistic revenue projections... but the market will probably not give them the benefit of the doubt...

Correct, but (in my tiny sample) not as fast as if more doctors had adopted. They all had lunches delivered and invites to dinner with RVNC management, so RVNC is trying... DTC advertising will do little for these doctors, btw. Their patients almost always follow their recommendations. It might initiate a discussion, but if the doctor says "the jury is still out" instead of "let's try it," the patients will wait.

My big hope is therapeutic uptake will plug the burn and give time for the cosmetic to improve.