I don't remember which Glorified CYDY Podcast I heard this story from. Someone with better memory than me - please feel free to correct this.
CYDY was originally setup to find a new HIV treatment drug. They had a bunch of research scientists and everything. Nader became CEO of Cytodyn just as it was about to go bankrupt with $2 in its bank account [DrBeen Interview]. Needless to say, CYDY was not having much success.
Progenics was researching different HIV drugs and PRO-140 was one of them. Paul Madden invented PRO-140 in 1996 and saw the potential of the drug but was upset that Progenics was going to move forward and commercialize a different research drug.
PRO-140 development was originally funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (National Institutes of Health). The projected cost to complete the research and bring the product to market was hundreds of millions of dollars based on the funding agreement with NIH. That's why Progenics wanted to give up on PRO-140 and develop a different drug that had lower development costs.
Nader was introduced to Paul Madden through a mutual contact. Nader was struggling to find a drug for CYDY to commercialize. Madden had a drug no one wanted to develop. It was fate. It was a chance encounter. Call it whatever you want.
Nader learned the upside potential of PRO-140 from Paul Madden and decided it was the drug to save CYDY. Nader worked a deal to purchase the patent from Progenics for $3.5M, two future milestone payments of $1.5M and $5M plus 5% royalties from any future sales for the length of the original PRO-140 patent. This was October 2012.
One of the first things Nader did, was end the NIH research funding agreement for PRO-140 because he realized it wasn't attainable for a small company like CYDY. Then he fired all the research scientists and hired a bunch of staff with expertise bringing Leronlimab to market.
If Nader didn't step in, Progenics would have ended research of PRO-140. All that knowledge would be in a 3-ring binder somewhere on a bookshelf [or in the trash heap, lol].
How did Nader 'know' PRO-140 would be great? The same way you or I found out about it. I'm a civil engineer and know nothing about HIV drug development. I did my own due diligence, made sure the information I read passed the BS meter, and kept reading up on it until I felt I understood enough about Leronlimab to make an informed investment decision.
Do I think it's great? Yeah, I think Leronlimab is to RANTS what penicillin was to bacteria. When they first discovered penicillin, they didn't really have a deep understanding about the bacteria it was used against. I think the current state of medical science doesn't really understand the roll of RANTS in many seemingly unrelated diseases. Who would have thought that Alzheimer's could possibly be a RANTS auto-immune disease?
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