Can MNKD go it alone??

[lakemann]

Any thoughts on this?

[sccrbrg]

They would need a sizeable 0% interest loan from Al to get any confidence returned to the share price. Fund operations off of al for the time being, get the share price stabilized and rising - then MAYBE they can sell the investors on the idea of taking on more debt without seeing the stock price tumble.

If they go it alone without any financing it almost assuredly means there's going to be a massive secondary and this will be a penny stock (more so than it already has been)

[mnkdmorelong]

Many drug companies with new products often go it alone.  They have better control over the sales force and messaging.  But this comes at a considerable cost.

Afrezza is an insulin so it make sense to comarket it with other insulins.  This is the SNY deal.  

To gin up a reasonable sales force will cost millions and will not be as effective as SNY's.  Why?  SNY's sales force is trained, have the relationships and can live off of other sales while Afrezza develops.  A totally new sales force must live off of Afrezza.  

In sum, MNKD can go it alone if it had big bucks.

[matt]

Most pharma companies cannot go it alone, the exception being those that treat rare diseases where only 100 physician offices nationwide treat those patients. You can easily service 100 offices with a handful of sales reps, even though their territories are huge, because there are so few customers and probably no competing drugs for the rare disease.

Diabetes is sold to primary care physicians and endocrinologists, of which there are 500,000 working in 150,000 physical locations.  Most of the big pharma boys that play in primary care markets have huge sales forces, on the order of 600, and may "rent" extra heads around the time of a product launch.  While I am not saying that MNKD needs 600 heads to compete head on with Lilly, Novo, and Sanofi they are going to need several hundred and the company simply does not have the cash or the ability to raise that kind of cash.  Other potential partners, seeing that Sanofi failed to make Afrezza a success, are not going to be standing in line to be the successor and, if they can be persuaded, the terms are going to be very tough.

Rock meet hard place.  It will be interesting to see what they say on the conference call.