Mar. 21 at 8:49 PM
$VXRT
CUT TO THE CHASE
So our CEO received another boatload of equities, now owning nearly 4.2 million securities, after losing 46% of our value in the two years since the day he took over on March 18, 2024, when we were trading at
$1.16.
The optics are horrible, and there's a huge disconnect between retail and the BOD's opinion of his performance.
Why the high equity compensation? Why now? What is going on? Is there an elephant in the room?
Possibilities:
1. Golden Parachute.
2. Retention Bonuses: A retention incentive to ensure they stay with the company through the transition period.
3. Stock awards tied to milestones
4. Change of control and acquisition negotiations.
5. Legal or regulatory requirements for stock-based compensation or performance bonuses to be awarded, irrespective of acquisition plans.
6. Signals confidence to the market.
7. Tax or structuring considerations: There may be tax advantages in granting the shares to the CEO before an acquisition happens.
8. Acquisition plans could change.
9. CEO’s contribution to the deal, recognizing leadership in a transition.
I believe it’s none of the above.
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Re: the newly published Stanford study with Sean, Nolan, and Mcllwain: The government is now funding us for Covid and to study flu. If anything about Vaxart was normal, our stock would be exploding. But make no mistake folks, the government is still funding us to study flu, nearly a decade after our challenge study. That is telling.
The study was funded by HHS, ASPR, NIH Cooperative Centers for Translational Research in Human Immunology and Biodefense Opportunity Fund seed grant, and the FDA's Medical Countermeasures Initiative contracts 75F40120C00176 and HHSF223201610018C.
The latter contract funded a host of Stanford studies for our benefit. Two years ago, I posted volumes about this contract as it related to Vaxart, Stanford, the Medical Countermeasures Initiative, and the Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats (OCET).
OCET supports efforts to develop vaccines and treatments for diseases that have the potential to spread quickly, works on countermeasures for biological and chemical agents that could be used in terrorist attacks, is heavily involved in the preparedness and response efforts for pandemics, and also oversees the development and deployment of emergency medical countermeasures to protect public health in the event of an outbreak or attack.
Here's a quick summary of how the new Stanford study can help Vaxart:
1. Vaxart could better assess the timing and duration of immune responses, helping to optimize dosing schedules and booster recommendations.
2. If could help predict the duration of protection and shedding status in individuals, even before symptoms appear. This would allow earlier interventions and better targeting of at-risk populations.
3. It could help Vaxart refine their vaccines to enhance mucosal immunity, particularly at key entry points.
4. It could help provide/improve preventive and diagnostic tools for infectious diseases. Vaxart could get better clinical insights into how their vaccines are working and whether someone is contagious during the early stages of infection.
5. The temporal immune markers identified in the study could help Vaxart refine universal vaccine strategies by focusing on immune responses that offer broad, cross-protective immunity and help predict long-lasting and early protection from new variants.
Imo, my last post was the most important I’ve ever dropped. Allow me to use reverse engineering to explain why:
1. The most important catalyst we could ever have is a universal vaccine.
2. In order to accomplish that, we need to find broadly neutralizing antibodies.
3. In order to find broadly neutralizing antibodies, we need to mine the B cells.
4. However, B cell sampling was not done in PNG and has never been done at scale because the sampling is too invasive. And blood samples don’t directly represent the full mucosal immune response.
5. The good news is there are ways to detect and isolate mucosal antibodies or mucosal immune signatures from blood samples, and Fred Hutch does this:
1. Isolate and stimulate B cells from blood with mucosal cytokines and antigens to detect mucosal-like IgA production.
2. Use cytokine profiling to detect signatures of mucosal immunity.
3. Screen for memory B cells with mucosal specificity that may already be circulating.
4. High-throughput screening of blood-derived antigen-specific B cells to discover broadly neutralizing mucosal antibodies.
So Fred Hutch could detect IgA memory B cells that can produce broadly neutralizing antibodies to guide the development of mucosal vaccines, including universal vaccines. Fred Hutch is a leader in the field at doing this.
I’ve learned a lot in the last few days about this whole process. It turns out the number of broadly neutralizing antibodies from our PNG cohort will be less than I thought.
However, it only takes one elite antibody to drive a pipeline for a decade.
Here’s what one primary elite antibody (like VX22) can do for Vaxart, a list of vaccines and estimated revenue for 2025 based on one primary antibody.
Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine – 1 antibody –
$12-15 billion
Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine – 1 antibody –
$10-12 billion
Gardasil (HPV Vaccine) – Merck – 1-2 antibodies–
$6-8 billion
Cervarix (HPV Vaccine) – GlaxoSmithKline – 1-2 antibodies –
$2-3 billion
Hepatitis B Vaccine – Merck – 1 antibody–
$1-1.5 billion
Engerix-B (Hepatitis B Vaccine) – GlaxoSmithKline – 1 antibody–
$1-1.5 billion
YF-VAX (Yellow Fever Vaccine) – Sanofi Pasteur – 1 antibody –
$0.5-1 billion
MMR II (Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccine) – Merck – 3 antibodies –
$1.5-2 billion
Pneumovax 23 (Pneumococcal Vaccine) – Merck – 1-2 antibodies –
$3-4 billion
Varivax (Chickenpox Vaccine) – Merck – 1 antibody –
$1-1.5 billion
While we might discover several hundred mucosal broadly neutralizing antibodies in the PNG cohort, real-world attrition would significantly reduce the number of distinct, functional, broadly neutralizing antibodies available for universal vaccine development.
Here’s the final estimated numbers of functional, broad mucosal broadly neutralizing antibodies that we can expect from PNG, after filtering for duplicates, functionality, specificity, breadth, and other factors.
These revised numbers are much more realistic:
• Number of distinct bnAbs discovered: 240–290
• Number of functional and specific bnAbs: 120–145
• Number of broadly neutralizing, cross-reactive bnAbs: 24–29
• Viable universal vaccine candidates: 4–9
So in 2,700 people, after accounting for all filtering attributes, we can realistically expect to identify 4 to 9 highly potent, cross-reactive mucosal broadly neutralizing antibodies that have the potential to be used in universal vaccines. I’m using conservative numbers, and this is a plausible outcome.
It’s possible we could find multiple elite antibodies for different indications, therefore representing the primary antibodies for multiple universal vaccines.
Remember folks, mucosal antibodies have never been mined at scale, so we are on the precipice of revolutionary science.
Re: the antibody spin-out forming around VX22, could Vaxart be looking at an antibody spin-out as well after they find broadly neutralizing antibodies from PNG?
Here’s the revised estimated number of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) that could realistically be found for each virus from our PNG cohort. Like VX22, any one of these could be the foundation for a pipeline or universal vaccine, valued in the billions over time:
1. SARS: 4 bnAbs
2. Influenza: 1 bnAb
3. RSV: 2 bnAbs
4. Norovirus: 1 bnAb
5. Enteroviruses: 1 bnAb
Estimated serum and mucosal bnAbs:
• Serum bnAbs: Likely 9
• Mucosal bnAbs: Likely 4–6
The number of broadly neutralizing antibodies needed per virus for a universal vaccine:
Influenza 3–5
SARS-CoV-2 2–4
RSV 1–2
Norovirus 3–5
Enteroviruses 3–5
The probability of finding broadly neutralizing antibodies per virus:
SARS-CoV-2 Very high (>90%)
RSV High (70–90%)
Influenza Moderate–high (50–80%)
Norovirus Uncertain (30–60%)
Enteroviruses Low–moderate (20–50%)
Bottom line: The combination of 2,700 donors and deep B-cell mining results in high probability for elite antibody discovery.
However, even if we successfully find broadly neutralizing antibodies, vaccines often fail to reliably elicit them. This is the central bottleneck in HIV and Influenza, where the bnAbs are known, but universal vaccines are still elusive because traditional vaccines can't elicit them.
However, our vaccines have several built-in advantages to elicit elite antibodies, demonstrated by our ability to elicit one elite antibody from only 165 subjects in our Noro human challenge trial.
The last few months I’ve been posting about proprietary assays, our antibody discovery engine, and now our mucosal antibody library.
But all of it depends on elite antibodies and our ability to elicit them.
This is the whole enchilada, the big show, the whole kit and caboodle, the main event, the entire ball of wax, the whole nine yards, the critical piece, the entire story.
Without broadly neutralizing antibodies and our ability to elicit them, we have nothing.
But we’ll see action after the 5K data.
And BP knows this, and they’re desperate to replace billion-dollar patent cliffs.
I like our chances.
