I know there has been some chatter here in recent days about Benitec and Nant. I am trying to put to bed a very busy October with preparations to go give a week of lectures on American biotech in Moscow, so I am behind on things.
This will not degenerate into Benitec bashing, or only slightly. Folks, Benitec is dead. And while it’s not popular to say it, an alliance with Patrick Soon-Shiong’s outfit is nothing but kiss of death. Nant alliances are where biotech projects go to die, and Soon-Shiong among the smart money has developed a bad reputation for passivity, for laziness, for pipe-dreaming, for building sand castles in the sky. In my view, no one should touch a Soon-Shiong property with investor dollars. Just smile and snicker as he lives out his days showing up on the dais, giving awards, receiving awards, launching hollow bon mots and leading both oncology and his own people absolutely nowhere. Soon-Shiong has contributed one thing to medicine: an altered dose form of paclitaxel, hopelessly enriched himself with that, and will mark his days fretting over his cufflinks, paring his nails, and posing for photographs onstage at gatherings to be forgotten in a year.
Let me remind you: ddRNAi failed in its first outing. It failed because of reasons I warned Peter French and David Suhy about in a spring 2014 letter. And the company still operates under a flawed premise. Folks, the whole field of RNAi is still proving itself, success here, failure there. ddRNAi is ridiculously complicated as opposed to complex, with uncertain issues regarding triggers, binding sequences, cassette construction, ambiguous RISC and DICER cleavage points, off-target actions and delivery.There’s yet no evidence it’s led to a homogeneous set of reactions within cells, so untameable it is. It may be setting off reactions both ungovernable and futile and probably those reactions don’t kill the host because they sputter. I have said before: all instances where it is to be invoked need to have been successfully test-driven first with lipid particle-delivered dsRNAi, NOT ddRNAi, to see if the pathway to be tweaked is even valid. ddRNAi is non-withdrawable, and it’s a hell of a thing to do to someone without proof of RNAi efficacy in the molecular pathology chosen. But Benitec is still ornery, passive, deaf Benitec, shunning clinicians because its certain its PhDs, utterly innocent of the clinic, can do better.
Benitec is the laughingstock at some of this country’s best clinical trial centers, including Duke and UCSD. And they are NOT welcome back. Those places loathe being associated with hubris and failure.
Things are NOT going to get better at Benitec….they will now get worse. We’ve a company helmed by a nice guy, Greg West, who’s more competent that Petey French, but who wouldn’t be? West has NO science or medical background. David Suhy may be a good bench scientist but he’s a dreamboy narcissist who ignores his own limits and the advice of earnest others. None are as blind as those who refuse to see. Two names now stand for failure in biotech: Benitec and Nant (I could regale you for 4000 words as to how Nant utterly gutted and decapitated one of my best investments, Sorrento, and they shall not be forgiven for that. Nant has killed one of the best ideas of our time, CAR-NK. They own the IP and plan to let it gather dust.). This is not the start of something good. Rather it’s the beginning of the dirge.
$BNTC = $DEAD. Unload those shares, put paid to it and move on with your life. And as ever, Pannobhaso’s proboscis is lodged firmly, probably with concrete, in his back passage.
BLT Price at posting:
11.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
