Los de M.Fool parece que están nerviosos y sacan toda la artillería, justo antes de noticias…?
Patrick Bafuma (Novavax): When someone shows you who they are, you should pay attention the first time. That is why I'm avoiding Novavax.
There are two traits I look for in early stage
biotech and med-tech companies: good ideas and even better management. Excellent leadership that has come together to guide a smaller biotech company piques my interest. Unproven companies with unproven leaders I find much riskier. It's about minimizing my downside.
Take Moderna, for instance. Its CEO Stéphane Bancel was the CEO of medium-cap French medical diagnostics company bioMérieux SAand a director at heavyweight Eli Lilly. Moderna's Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer Juan Andres was previously the global head of technical operations for Novartis. Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna's chief medical officer, was the chief global medical affairs officer of Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
Stanley Erck, president and CEO of Novavax, has been with the company since 2011, hails from IOMAI, a biotech company, as does Greg Glenn, president of research & development for Novavax. Rick Crowley was appointed chief operations officer after leaving TerSera Therapeutics. If you haven't heard of IOMAI or TerSera, that's the point -- I want leadership that has performed at a high level with larger companies.
I readily admit Novavax has had a meteoric rise-up just under 19 times from March 1, 2020. But if you have been investing in biotech for the last ten years, this was probably predictable. In the summer of 2009 when the H1N1 flu started up, Novavax capitalized for investors but failed to deliver a meaningfully useful vaccine. With the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in early 2012, the now 33-year-old biotech without a product was there. And it's not just the latest pandemic that Novavax has whiffed on-- the company swung and missed hard for a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine too.
While this $19 billion market cap vaccine-maker hopeful paints a rosy picture of its COVID future, seasoned investors have seen this story before. Spoiler alert: Investors late to the party often held the bag until this company would fall back into
penny stock land. Over the last 20 years, I've witnessed Novavax throwing its technology at the latest pandemic and a few other diseases too. All unsuccessfully. Why should COVID-19 be any different?