Martin Shkreli Destroys MORE Public Company Value -- From Beyond The Grave...

It has been over 18 months since the public company entered bankruptcy, as a result of Mr. Shkreli's fraud. It has been over a year, since it emerged from that bankruptcy. And this morning, it lost 70 per cent of its market value, in the NASDAQ Pink Sheets, almost unbelievably due to. . . yerp, Mr. Shkreli -- the vampire from beyond the grave.

FiercePharma is reporting that the non-profits which felled the newly renamed Humanigen, lately out of South San Francisco, did so as a means of effectively striking back -- at the now thrice-felony convicted Mr. Shkreli, for threatening to gouge the price on these old Chagas drugs (threatening to price them like Gilead's Hep C juggernauts) -- should he ever win FDA approval. That was December 2015.

So. . . a coalition of non-profits joined a Madrid, Spain based small affiliate of a generic manufacturer there. . . and beat the fully-revamped, ethical leadership of KaloBios (now Humanigen) to market, here in the US. In the process, it likely won a PRV worth as much as $300 million (in the aftermarket -- to other profit-driven multinational pharmaceutical bidders).

Here is what poor Humanigen said, by an SEC filed Form 8-K, this morning:

. . . .On August 29, 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it had granted accelerated approval of a benznidazole therapy manufactured by another company for the treatment of Chagas disease, and had awarded the other manufacturer a tropical disease priority review voucher (PRV).

As a result of FDA’s actions and with the information currently available, Humanigen, Inc. no longer expects to be eligible to receive a PRV with its own benznidazole candidate for the treatment of Chagas disease. Accordingly, Humanigen is assessing its options in respect of that development program and the company’s monoclonal antibodies, lenzilumab and ifabotuzumab. . .

One literally could not make this up. Dr. Cameron Durrant is a fine business leader, an ethical physician -- and a good human being. He did not deserve this fate -- but he did fall unwitting heir, here, to the sordid and feckless path that Mr. Shkreli burned through the life sciences world. . . . for the record, I covered it first, early this morning on another property. Wow. Onward.

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