I think this is only my second post, but I feel compelled to go through the NWBO story logically. Full disclosure I am a long for a long time, since about a year before the stock went over $12.
Logic Trail:
Approach "invented" by UCLA neurologists/researchers and NWBO wound up being the biotech entity to participate in the trials. Linda Liau, a top and respected neurologist becomes lead investigator of the Phase 3 trial (skipping Phase 1/2 trials to avoid writing a book.)
Trial winds up in multiple countries (USA, Germany, UK, Canada) and over 80 participating sites/hospitals, including UCLA, NYU, Overlook (in NJ), and many other highly respectable medical organizations and physicians in the USA.
In Germany and UK you have the equivalent highly respected physicians and organizations, and DCVAX-L achieves first of kind designations in Germany and in the UK, never mind that NWBO may not have received any payments, which might have been nice but nonetheless very significant as I doubt the smart people in Germany and the UK would have had anything to do with a fraud or scam company, trial, and treatment.
So far see the main point of establishing there are too many smart reputable people on both the trial and Governments health agencies and hospitals, etc.
Enter NW, fund manager extraordinaire putting up something like $180 million of investment. That's when I was convinced NWBO was for real and had a shot of succeeding, adding significantly to my position as I'm sure many did, enjoying the rise to over $12 per share.
NW hasn't sold, as many of us haven't, probably figuring wth, might as well stick with it as most of our investment is a paper loss anyway so might as well go big ( as a certain CEO with the initials LP likes to say.)
Now what do you all make of the obvious barrage of apparent distortions (being kind IMHO), very questionable law suits of interesting timing, routinely negative "journalist" pieces, and why not throw in an epic conglomeration of negative assertions from a mysterious "group" on a non-traceable site on the internet. What high drama and interest in this little biotech!!!
Just for extra measure, add in further drama of people who might have had conflicts of interest being involved in meetings and asking for manufacturing details related to this vaccine, IMHO.
So what came of all these negative energies, accusations, legal proceedings, and generally negative challenges? Not much with respect to bearing out the negatives, with cases resolved without major consequences, and many if not all negatives not being born out, and that mysterious internet group disappearing from the scene.
However, these "challenges" did get some of the perhaps intended results of casting aspersions, weakening NWBO financially, and probably causing NWBO to clam up to perhaps avoid further attacks and not provide even potentially good info that might be distorted, etc., all IMHO of course. It probably had influence on the stock price plummeting to the sub-dollar area we've been in for a long while now.
If you're given to conspiracy theories, one could write quite a screen play conjecturing a big coordinated multifaceted effort to drive little NWBO-like company into chapter 11. (Maybe Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen could be approached to reprise another Wall Street flick - "Blue Dingbat doesn't like lysate pulsed dendritic vaccines!")
Let's explore the movie theme a bit more, shall we? We need an already wealthy CEO type who takes on the challenges, maybe not only because of the huge business and monetary successes that might accrue, but our hero is more driven by a stronger conviction to make progress against a dreadful disease, and maybe to the point where even investors may have to be somewhat sacrificed by collateral damage to get this potentially game changing treatment over the finish line!! Wait, this treatment would not only make great progress against one of the worst cancers, but potentially all solid tumor cancers!!!
Of course, we would have a co-hero of the science and clinical application of outstanding skill, dedication, and integrity, who also has lost close family to this dreadful disease.
Our CEO character would be a solid and decent type who of course would be educated and graduated with honors from one of our best and most difficult to get into university schools. Hey, Princeton would fit that bill pretty well - if it worked for Russel Crowe in a Beautiful Mind, and Albert Einstein to teach at, it should be a nice touch for our story.
So our heroes fight the good fight against all these negative forces that would like to stop them from getting the disruptive treatment over the finish line. Despite taking a toll on our CEO type who keeps fighting the good fight and is determined to Go Big or Go Home, foregoing the temptation to sell out to forces that may or may not live up to their proposals to take the treatment over the finish line, and maybe our hero wants to share in the moment of success. Success perhaps more for humanity, than for the riches that may be earned.
Such a high stakes story line! Our hero and her team try real hard not to be tripped up as they see the light at the end of the tunnel. Timing is important and needs to be balanced right to run the trial long enough to assure the best shot of demonstrating the treatment's efficacy, while also feeling the pressure of keeping a promising treatment from those who might desperately need and benefit from it.
In the mean time, our hero and her team provide individual cases of treated patients that have had remarkable responses to treatment, and some that have survived many more years than even the most positive hopes. But the naysayers have done such a good job of impacting the stock price and probably also the general trust of this little biotech, that even the most dramatically wonderful survivors and their family members telling their remarkable experiences, and more than a smattering of positive articles and news pieces hitting the public after our team of heroes manage to publish some still blinded interim results, the fortunes of our little biotech and it's stock price barely improve. Apparently everyone is from Missouri now, so to speak.
Now for the dramatic finish! Will our heroes refuse to fall and find the last bits of energy (and funding) to cross the finish line successfully?
Wow! wouldn't it be poetic justice if one or two very high profile public figures in need of the treatment manage to find the treatment and greatly benefit from it? That would be too much of a stretch maybe for our story, but just saying.
But I digress, I started by saying I wanted to go through the logic trail and I wind up describing a movie.
Point is the logic that NWBO is a scam just doesn't seem to hold water.
Complaints that management probably made some mistakes might have some merit.
However there is also merit in what might be the genius of structuring a multi-country trial so as to not be at the mercy of any one FDA-like agency, a sort of checks and balances. There might also be genius in structuring the NWBO-Cognate relationship such that production was in friendly hands and provided a sort of poison pill against unfriendly takeover and protection of the Intellectual Property assets.
To those that knock NWBO impatiently, I suggest that it isn't easy to carry out this endeavor with a skeleton crew. I would imagine LP and LG are tired of managing this very long crusade with a small team. In fact, we all reacted to how tired LP appeared at the end of the ASCO webcast. Do the naysayers believe that our lead trial physician from the UK wasn't showing genuine emotion when speaking about what he has seen clinically?
So to end this very long post and go back to just reading all your posts, there is no guarantee of success until it is achieved and it all may end badly despite heroic efforts. It may also result in great progress against cancer, which my mother happens to be battling as well and I don't think DCVAX would be available soon enough to treat my mother's particular case and we are waiting for another experimental drug that may provide a miracle albeit not likely with the quality of life that DCVAX appears to offer.
I believe NWBO and LP in particular are doing the best they can and are committed to getting to the finish line for the fight against cancer more than for shareholders and even her own finances, and we will soon within a year either make it or at least pass the baton to others that will run the next leg of an ongoing relay race to beat cancer.
