TOLD YOU SEVERAL TIMES SINCE FRIDAY MORNING
Last Friday, Sorrento Therapeutics appeared to celebrate discovering a cure for the coronavirus in a widely disseminated Fox News article. The company’s stock rose 243% that day on about 78x its daily average volume.
However, former company employees and experts at Mt. Sinai, the NIH, and the Rockefeller Foundation confirmed to us that the news is likely too good to be true.
“I would never in my life have put out a press release where I say we have a cure,” a former Sorrento senior executive told us. He also estimated there are “hundreds” of groups with antibodies similar to Sorrento’s.
“I suggest extreme skepticism regarding any claims made by Sorrento,” another former employee told us.
“I am not aware of any data suggesting Sorrento’s single Ab is as good as the many others that had already been previously generated (such as ours or Lilly’s)” Regeneron’s co-founder told us.
Sorrento was nearly out of cash and facing growing questions of solvency leading up to its surprise cure announcement. The company put paperwork in place to sell $500 million of stock just weeks in advance of ‘discovering’ the cure.
After the financing arrangements were put in place, the company announced a collaboration with Mount Sinai, then within just three days began pitching journalists on its miraculous findings.
Meanwhile, one Mount Sinai researcher we talked to called Sorrento’s announcement “very hyped”. Another warned us that “nothing in medicine is 100%,” referring to the company’s claim of a solution that works 100% in the Fox News piece.
One of the company’s financing agreements is with a year-old entity in the British Virgin Islands. The mystery backer was unnamed, but multiple industry sources tell us it is the same individual that was behind financing shipping company DryShips in 2017. DryShips lost 99.9% of its value in 2017 and reverse split eight times between 2016 and 2017.
We believe that Sorrento’s actions are manipulative at the worst possible time and simply amount to an attempt to shamelessly profiteer off the pandemic.
We see significant downside from these levels and believe the company is already in the process of severely diluting its new unsuspecting investor base. We believe regulators should closely scrutinize the company’s actions over the last several weeks.
AI
