For what it's worth

Below is an abstract of KSS latest column on Gumshoe:

Benitec ($BTEBY): I’ll strive to be polite and professional about this, as I realize some readers remain long in Benitec. This company is in a state of billowing acrimony with the broader biotech investing community, and is not taken seriously in any big-money circles. “Worse than Benitec” has joined the superlative lexicon alongside “bigger than a breadbox” in the biotech twittersphere. It has not accomplished a single goal or expectation. Benitec has ignored well-intended expert advice, said it couldn’t change enrollment rules and then did so easily a year later. Most worryingly, the company absolutely refuses to release virus burdens on any patient treated with TT-034. A reasonable surmisal is that since even one patient with virological response would triple share price in a week, that Beni budges not because no HCV response has been observed. I can sketch a half-dozen molecular reasons why they may be seeing failure, all the way from the nature, primitive, of the expression cassette, to its lack of fidelity, to the very real phenomenon of extrahepatic HCV replication, which is impervious to liver-trafficked TT-034.
I’ve had not so kind things to say about Benitec’s “collaborations.” I regard these deals as flimsy, formulated based on a couple of chatty e-mails between the company and Benitec, and as no more substantive than a pushpin on a map. “Today Benitec, tomorrow the world…if only we had our navy’s first boat.” Benitec has claimed collaboration for years with Chinese firm Biomics, and this was clearly meaningless. Biomics is not a drugmaker: it is a Chinese equivalent of Sigma Aldrich ($SIAL) or of ThermoFisher ($TMO), supplying reagents and nucleic acid probes to the Chinese biotech industry. That Benitec has now taken over Biomics’ ddRNAi project fully for a relative pittance implies it was of no strategic importance to Biomics and that the asset is at an immature stage. Indeed, Benitec’s corporate website indicates the agent is merely in preclinical in vitro testing. I predict it will need two years of preclinical in vivo testing, dosing laboratory animals with the construct. Benitec is NOT up to bat in HBV. In fact, it hasn’t even found the baseball stadium yet.
Which leads me to one final closing point, one I feel I must make. What, if anything, is David Suhy doing? Could he not have worked on this? Why has Benitec hired a truncheon brigade of corporate lookers-on to inhabit its offices? What do they do? Shouldn’t the lion’s share of resources be placed into incubator research for ddRNAi therapeutics? It pains me to remind readers here that at one time, before incompetency and obliviousness was manifest, I was on the side of this company and willing to throw good ideas at them not for fame or personal lucre but because I know the liver space and because I wanted to see my sizable investment in Benitec appreciate. I sat down one weekend and wrote for Suhy two functional research papers with proposals, richly argued and referenced. One was what I think is a killer idea to use ddRNAi to silence NASH. The other was to use ddRNAi to remedy the molecular defect in Pi-ZZ alpha-1-proteinase inhibitor liver disease. Suhy ignored both, never even an acknowledgement, thank you or casual e-mail. The second of those ideas is now being advanced very quickly by Arrowhead ($ARWR), and is supporting its stock price.
What IS IT with these people??? I think of curmudgeonly Brahms, once in a dark sulk when he was invited by a group of friends for dinner in Vienna. Over the course of the evening, he managed to use his irascibility to irk everyone present. As coffee came around, Brahms stood up, put on his dusty hat, grabbed his coat and declared: “If there’s anyone I’ve NOT offended tonight, you have my regrets that I did NOT offend you.” Who has Benitec NOT offended in biotech?
By the way, if any patent attorneys are reading and want to help me patent the first idea, which I think is a brilliant one, I’d welcome your help. Seriously.