Matt Vincent FACTS:
So, if this is all true- then a VERY KEY former Sr Mgt team member, a close friend of Lanza, a guy with extensive experience of the inner workings of ACTC/OCATA just stated the following, "on the record" (first being that he LEFT OCATA BY CHOICE for "greener pastures", LOL !! You know, cause he wasn't gonna become a centi-millionaire as the little stem cell blog site thingy has claimed. SHAZAM, what a revelation from a key, former insider, LOL!)-
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Matt did leave Ocata at the end of the summer, but he was not forced out and he did not quit over differences with management. As he told me, it was a very tough decision. He has worked with Ocata/ACT in one form or another for a decade, and has made some of his closest friendships there, including with Dr. Lanza. Matt has his graduate degree from Tufts Medical School and has kept in touch and consulted with PhD advisor over the years, helping him to set up a company in the Boston area called Arisaph Pharmaceuticals (Matt is updating their website, in case you look at it is out of date). ...........
With respect Astellas, I had a chance to get a better understanding of the current deal materialized, and even though he had already left the company when it happened, a few of his views on it. Even though they were not vocal to us about their efforts, Matt told me that they were meeting with every big pharma company with ophthalmology programs (including Pfizer, GSK, Roche and Bayer) on a regular basis, and including the heads of opthalmology for those companies. The uniform message from these companies was, however, that they wanted to see data from a controlled and blinded clinical trial, such as a phase 2 trial, before they would invest heavily in a collaboration. According to Matt, theses companies were very upfront that they would rather wait and overpay for a program in order to avoid some of the risk of any early stage program, particularly in areas like gene and cell therapy. ........
Funding the phase 2 study by themselves would have required the company to further dilute the shareholders and probably would have driven the stock price down significantly lower (at least in Matt's estimation). .....
It was after Matt left Ocata that apparently Astellas decided that, based on the amount of money they we were willing to pay in upfront payments and milestones to Ocata, they would be better off buying the company (his conjecture) and the deal moved from being a partnership to an acquisition.
....As Matt put it, this is probably the best way to see a wide variety of Dr. Lanza's work beyond the RPE program be developed to the point that it can actually help patients.
Matt holds Astellas with the highest regard and wants us to know they are an honorable company. Again, only conjecture, but Matt does not think Astellas would be willing to go back to a partnership discussion, and expects that the current stock market conditions in Japan and the fact that Astellas did not raise the tender price indicates that Astellas has gone as high as they will go. ......
I mentioned Gary Aronson to Matt and what he is trying to do behind the scenes. With respect to a "white knight" scenario, Matt did not think that was likely. Because of the depth of discussions that Ocata has regularly had with all the major players and their position on wanting to wait for more data, he did not see how Gary Aaronson would be able to move another company to offer more for Ocata. ......
Matt also believes that the consequences could be serious if we do not do this deal now with Astellas. He said that if we walk away more dilution will be inevitable (see above) to keep the clinical trials going, and that the company would probably be forced to slow or even mothball some of the other science programs from Dr. Lanza, at least until the end of phase 2 of the RPE trials. I said it was a terrible deal for the longterm shareholders who have truly kept ACTC/ Ocata afloat and that no one thought of us. ...."
FANTASTIC. So a key "guy" a former "insider" pretty much lays it all out. OCATA NEEDS ASTELLAS TO SURVIVE, else it's dilution and "curtailing" much of Lanza's work- the consequences good be "dire" and a blah, blah, blah SHAZAM. What a freaking surprise. So the lousy $28 million, warrant laced secondary really was a sign of how poor a financial shape this company is in, AND that it was "shopped" EXHAUSTIVELY to that ever elusive ole "big pharma" (LOL) and they HAD NO TAKERS. TOO RISKY as they have a micro sized phase I trial of questionable results, no blinding, small sample size, etc and thus NO ONE WAS INTERESTED, LOL !!
Wowza, what a surprise. Astellas is the gift horse. The savior. The ONE and ONLY OFFER and now a guy, a former "insider" who's very much "in the know" confirms it even further as far as I can tell by reading the words of the guy.
No surprise here to me. ALL jives with what many have believed all along. OCATA is cash poor, their trials are struggling, their NOT some "golden nugget" prize they've often been hyped to be- some $BILLION or $TRILLION dollar "biggest thing to medicine in the past 100 years" as the little magic stem cell blog site thingy claims- but in FACT are a high risk, micro-cap with $100's of MILLIONS more needed to know if they'll ever even have ONE salable product to take to market, let alone any revenues (surprisingly, JUST WHAT THEIR OWN SEC FILINGS CLEARLY STATE).
Nothing new or surprising there from ole Matt Vincent the former insider, not IMO.
