“I’m putting my money where my mouth is,” he said. The stock price reached new heights.īarbier admitted that his company’s fortunes depended on the drug, saying, “We’re a moonshot with one rocket ship.” Nevertheless, he was comfortable with the “high-risk, high-reward” aspect of the business, so much so that he and his family owned more than a million shares of Cassava. In February, 2021, Cassava touted a round of promising results from another trial-without a placebo-and claimed that, in an unprecedented breakthrough, Simufilam could actually renew cognitive function. But Barbier said that there must be some mistake, and subsequently announced that the company had commissioned a reanalysis, by an outside lab, and that the data showed a significant improvement in biomarkers for Alzheimer’s compared with a placebo. In May, 2020, the company acknowledged that the results of a clinical trial had been unsuccessful. And the National Institutes of Health had awarded some twenty million dollars in grants to Cassava and its academic collaborators. Scientists affiliated with the company had published papers in peer-reviewed journals. In the tart summation of the medical-news Web site STAT, “Barbier has a reputation for profiting personally even while his company suffered multiple setbacks.”īarbier insisted that his Alzheimer’s drug was a different story. In about a decade, the stock lost most of its value meanwhile, Barbier compensated himself with nearly thirty million dollars. But, because Pain Therapeutics was publicly traded, it managed to stay alive on the fumes of investor optimism. In 2003, Sidney Wolfe, of the watchdog group Public Citizen, cautioned that Remoxy “sounds too good to be true.” He was right: the drug never earned F.D.A. The drug, Remoxy, seemed so promising that investors poured money into the firm. In fact, until 2019, Cassava had been named Pain Therapeutics and was known primarily for developing what it described as the groundbreaking formulation of an opioid painkiller that had little risk of abuse. This was an astounding turn for Barbier’s company, which had no laboratories of its own, contracted out most of the science, and didn’t have much of a track record in Alzheimer’s research. Cassava’s stock symbol is sava, and devotees of the company called themselves “ savages.” They weren’t necessarily scientists, but they felt certain that Cassava would, in the words of one Redditor, “eradicate Alzheimer’s.” Another stockholder declared, “Ever since I seen the 10% conginitive improvement I’ve been convinced.” Barbier, meanwhile, told Fortune that a core group of institutional investors had looked at the preliminary data and concluded that, from an investment perspective, Cassava might be the next “Google or Tesla.” Last summer, a user on the Web site Seeking Alpha proclaimed, “ cassava sciences is on the brink of making medical history,” enthusing, “CEOs of public companies don’t make these kinds of statements unless they can back it up.” In July, Cassava’s stock price surged to a hundred and thirty-five dollars, giving it a market value of roughly five billion dollars. Cassava issued press releases touting the results of its clinical trials, and Barbier suggested that Simufilam was “the first drug-to our knowledge-that can restore cognition.” Word spread about the product on online forums, including Reddit, and Cassava became a “meme stock,” surging in value as it was hyped by relatively unsophisticated retail day traders. Six million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, and any drug that could ameliorate the condition would represent a milestone in public health-and make billions of dollars. The medication has not yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration, but clinical trials are under way. It has been developing a novel treatment for Alzheimer’s, a pill called Simufilam, which is designed to attack the disease by fixing abnormalities of the protein filamin A. Cassava is run by Remi Barbier, a genial entrepreneur who wears wire-rimmed glasses and is given to ambitious predictions. With only two dozen employees and no product revenue, the Austin-based biotech firm generated a stampede of investor enthusiasm that caused its stock to rise nearly fifteen hundred per cent. Yet, even in this warped moment, the outsized success last year of a tiny company called Cassava Sciences seemed exceptional. These are strange days for the American stock market, with the exuberance of investors defying the bleakest of outlooks. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |