ALT Short Report, VKTX Buyout Rumors, I'm Buying VERU

Lickety-Split Analytics

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-Ashley Adams

Kerrisdale Capital’s Short Report on Altimmune (ALT)

On February 13th, Kerrisdale Capital published a short report on Altimmune, a company testing their candidate, Pemvidutide, in obesity and NASH. Pemvidutide is a novel GLP-1/glucagn dual receptor agonist that works by increasing lipid metabolization.

On Twitter, Kerrisdale posted,

“We're short $ALT. Report available at http://kerr.co/alt. Altimmune's only asset is pemvidutide, a dual GLP-1/glucagon with no chance of commercial success. The drug has awful tolerability and underwhelming weight-loss activity. It's going to bomb in phase-3.”
-@KerrisdaleCap

The report on Kerrisdale’s site includes a number of factual errors that B Riley summarized eloquently in their Flash Report:

“Numerous factual inconsistencies point to lack of rigor to the short thesis; a few select examples being:

(1) recent Ph. II SYNERGY-NASH liver biopsy NASH resolution benefit of 74% noted with top-dose tirzepatide mischaracterized as liver fat reduction when doing cross-trial comparison vs. ALT’s pemvi which reported 76% on liver fat reduction endpoint in Ph. Ib NAFLD study and is yet to report on biopsy results from ongoing Ph. IIb IMPACT study (2/6 note);

(2) initial 24-week IMPACT study liver biopsy readout expected in 1Q, not late 2025 as claimed in the report; and