Pipeline-in-a-drug, page-125

That would not amount to contractual fraud - it would amount to nothing more than giving effect to the provision as its written. A court would tell you to play on, given you followed the contract to the letter....

Which part is fraudulent?

Its not Bogus in my view - if you are a director, you have fiduciary obligations and if you fail to maximise shareholder value by letting a competitor steal your lunch, when you had the power to stop it legally, then you would have to justify how you did not breach those obligations. You would be looking at a fine, disqualification from directorship or worse.

Mate, reverse the situation. If Neuren had Trofinetide and planned to explore it in a range of different ASD related/adjacent conditions and also had the ability to stop a competitor from developing a competitor drug that was better in every way, do you think you would be happy as a shareholder to watch them sit by, ignore the contractual provisions that allow them to intervene and protect their commercial interests and do nothing?? Would you be thrilled to watch your investment never truly materialise or worse?

The threat for us would be existential and for all the talk of good faith, which is both implicit in all and explicit in most well drafted contracts, us acting in our best interest to the letter of the contract would not even raise the eyebrow of the courts - especially in a commercial transaction at arm's length between sophisticated parties that have legal representation.

What would pique the interest of the courts would be Directors who failed to satisfy their fiduciary obligations and exercise the restraints in the contract. It's not even a stretch of the imagination - "Your Honour, we purchased Trofinetide from Neuren because we are a Neurological Pharma company and want to further our developing pipeline into rare neurological diseases. One Neurological treatment line we have commenced pursuit of is ASD related/adjacent conditions, as evidenced by Daybue in Retts. We have a fulsome pipeline and have been undertaking mouse model studies to assess the validity of Daybue in other conditions, which just so happen to overlap with those proposed by our competitor. We therefore submit that we are acting in good faith and pursuing the development of our valuable drug in debilitating conditions".

People sue all the time for all different reasons - look at Mesoblast. Not hard to think that in the US, where lawyers live to see ambulances, they would not consider it.