So, we have a situation where the University which spun out TIS based on "technology" it had developed, effectively admitted that the research on which it was based was fraudulent, resulting in a scientific paper being withdrawn and a research grant having to be repaid and this apparently was not material to shareholders?????? You then have a large pharmaceutical who undertook a year of research into the product and declined to proceed with it "because some of the input ingredients were too expensive" (Really?). You then have us all ready for the issue of a CE mark based on a device classification and suddenly completely out of the blue, the EMA says no, it's not a device, but a biologic, thereby needing a clinical trial (presumably, the EMA people would have been aware of the preceding major question marks about VG's effectiveness, thus the sudden unexpected change in position sort of makes sense from that perspective ).
All the time, of course, investors are being told about the huge market and about the effectiveness of VG.
Now, the FTT revival happened after the EMA failure obviously, but the new board decided the only way forward was to actually do a clinical trial. But with all this information ( a lot of which was never announced to the market), wouldnt you be undertaking massive due diligence, bending over backwards and turning over every stone to be very very confident that VG in fact was likely to be effective, before raising funds from investors to fund a very expensive trial?
The directors at the time had or ought to have been aware of all of the above. Shareholders were never told. Shareholders relied upon the directors and management to review everything (scientific papers, previous trial data, Invitrogen communications about their R and D; QUT "R and D" (if that ever ocurred) etc, before coming to shareholders. To that time, shareholders had been repeatedly fed the line that VG was very effective and they had no reason to doubt the technology. The BoD had cause for suspicion though.
From my personal perspective, the very reason I invested was that I had assumed that with the likes of CB and other new directors, coming on board, they would have turned the place upside down with due diligence to determine the effectiveness of VG, before proceeding to a trial even without the history set out above. Given that history however, you would have thought they would have doubled down on due diligence efforts.
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