Led, great post. You echo my thoughts exactly.

I believe KD will want his own billions out of this as will NGN. I do not believe that KD would care less about a $5, $10, $50 a share. Hepalink I believe is an asset to an aquisitor because of it's huge distribution potential. I am always surprised by the low valuations that people put on these companies.

Led, I don't know what you mean by KD wanting to destroy his opponents. Who are the opponents in this case? Also, I have not seen any evidence that Eastern has any operational involvement. They do not even have a member on the board even though they own 20% of the company. Seems like they just trust Don and Dr Wong.

In terms of both companies, Zenith and RVX, there is a very long journey (many years - beyond 2020) before any compound will make it to market if any ever do make it to market. zen3694 is only at the very beginning of it's journey and has years of trials ahead before any success can be claimed. Apebetalone is not even half way through the BETonMACE trial. A fourth DSMB pass will help. But Apabetalone is a 3 point MACE trial and we have limited(virtually NO) data on that. In addition, apabetalone may fail the futility analysis. I hope the futility analysiis includes the secondary measues and that those measures will support the drug. 

Like you, Led, I do believe that something significant is in the works.

Foolishly a few years back I had convinced myself that, given the apabetalone + Crestor patents, that AZ would move in fast. I was wrong. Likewise, I have hope that the early stages of the zen3694 + enzalutimide trial will peak Pfizer's interest. They have a war chest of billions to invest. However, if the purchase of enzalutimde by Pfizer is any hint of a pattern, I believe that enzalutimde was on the market for 4 years as a standard of care drug for mCRPC before Pfizer paid $14 billion for 50%. So we may have a long wait. Zenith is silent. Who knows what that means? Certainly not me.

The good news IMHO is that we now know that Pfizer is playing around with apabetalone as are independent academic scientists. One coulld infer at least some other drug companies have been kicking the tires.

I think it is very clear that scientific interest in RVX and epigenetiics is increasing.

Therefore, if it is years before any of the RVX and Zenith drugs hit the market, what is the current value of these companies to a acquisitor?

1. IP and patents.
2. The scaffolds used to produce the 1500 compounds for RVX and the 2500 for Zenith.
3. The methods they have developed.
4. The blood bank.
5. Apabetalone evidence to date.
6. The people/scientists at RVX and Zenith.
7. The potential for a quick hit by zen3694 onmCRPC.

Being a frustrated optimistic investor I still have no doubt that the future will be very positive in some form or another. I believe epigenetics (the ability to program genes to produce or not produce certain proteins) is leading edge science and will to be very powerful in many diseases. Gene splicing and the advent of CRSPR will be valuable at some point but changing gene structure of a gene means that those traits, good or bad, will be passed down through generations. This could be good or bad. Epigenetics alters the actions of protein production within an individual but it does not restructure the genes.

I often recall, either from a post or perhaps something on the website that traces the background of Resverlogix and it was that Dr Wong was infuenced by information from Drs Crick of Watson (discoverers of the double helix structure of genes) to the effect that one of them said that epigenetics is the future of medicine for many diseases. I believe this and I think there will be exponential scientific interest in this field leading to a dramatic growth in research funding. If RVX has an 8 year lead in their very specific research regarding apabetalone as a selective BETi inhibitor it will continue to attract interest.

So we are in a period of great uncertainty. I think the only value at this stage is if some acquisitor has been examining the research, assessing the post hocs, analysing the MOA of apabetalone and even kicking the tires of the Apebetalone with their own testing and they are becoming convinced that there is really a high potential for this drug or the companies in terms of scaffolds, etc. that we will see business as usual probably until the success of BETonMACE.

If futility fails????? (I believe the IP etc will live on as will the companies)

IMHO, DYODD, GLTA

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