Just doing some Sunday night reading on a company called Celator which used to trade under the symbol CPXX on the Naz before they were bought out by Jazz Pharmeceuticals for $1.5 billion USD.  Celator was targeting a treatment for a form of Leukemia, and according to a MF article on the buyout Jazz could win big with the acquisition if the drug is approved.  

Here's the article:  

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/27/why-celator-pharmaceuticals-is-up-1610-in-2016.aspx

Now...I don't know what the patient population is like for this form of Leukemia....perhaps its quite large.  But I can't imagine its greater than the diabetic population, or the CKD population for that matter.   And that got me to thinking about all the possible applications Apabetalone could have.

Diabetes, CKD, Thrombosis, Alzheimers, Degenerative Retinal Disease, Friedreich's Ataxia, Muscular Dystrophy....

How many is that so far?  1, 2, 3....7 so far.  And the MOA of apabetalone suggests there could be even more, maybe even Bi-Polar as there seems to be an arterial compoenent to that disease as well.  

How many people contract the form of Leukemia, Acute Myeloid Leukemia or AML for short...how many people in the US contract this disease?  According to Cancer.Org over 62K cases of Leukemia (all kinds) are contracted each year in the US and for AML they estimate there will be about 21.3 thousand cases in 2017....

So US population for this disease is somewhere around 20K per year...check.  And the value placed on it was $1.5 billion in USD....double check.

What about the Diabetic population in the US, to keep this apples to apples.  

According to the American Diabetics Association in 2012 there were over 20 million diabetics who'd been diagnosed and another 8 million odd who were undiagnosed.  The same site says 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed ever year.  

Recap....

AML has a patient population of 20 odd thousand as being diagnosed each year.  Diabetes has 1.4 million......

Okay....so a potential treatment for AML garners $1.5 billion, so what's Apabetalone potentially worth with a patient population that is exponentially higher?  Meh....let's just say $3.0 billion USD for the diabetes application.

What about CKD?  According to the National Kidney Foundation nearly half a million Americans are on Dialysis....0.5 million now what kind of value could Apabetalone have there.  Meh....let's peg it $1 billion USD

Onward we go, thrombosis...according to the US Center for Disease Control somewhere between 60 and 100K Americans die from DVT/PE each year.....Let's give that indication a value of $1 billion USD....

I think its obvious where this is heading, I hadn't even gotten to Alzheimer's.....So what is "fair value" for Apabetalone? Based on all the potential applications I don't think US $10 billion is unreasonable, and its probably WAY WAY WAY CONSERVATIVE if RVX-208 succeeds with all of its potential.

And maybe that's the problem?  Could it be that DM has put such an incredibly lofty valuation on Apabetalone that even BP companies with their mountains of cash, that they're unwilling to take a chance no matter how good things might look?  

Years ago I read a compilation of Short Stories by Kurt Vonnegut which was titled "Welcome to The Monkey House"....one of the stories was about a household and the conflicts that ensued many years in the future after then invention of a drug that stopped the ageing process.  

Could Apabetalone stop that process?  Or substanially mitigate it?  Maybe they should change the name to Ponce de Leon Pharmeceuticals?