"Bottom line is you really nailed it..."
Interesting. IMO neither one of you really understands the reasoning behind separating the marketing from the process of R&D and creating new drugs. You're so focused on the ST that you can't see how this set up allows the companies to create more and better drugs w/o the need for thousands of employees per drug at Ionis.
Yes Akcea mgmt is not free but judging their progress over a time period when they had no drugs to sell is short sighted.
I'm frustrated too by the lack of progress in the share price of Ionis but I'm not blaming Akcea for that situation. I blame the Thrombo problems of a few years ago and the amount of time it takes to move drugs from idea to preclinical to approval and profit. HBV took 9 years to get this far.
Once some of these 10 P3 drugs get approved and start selling thru Akcea and other partners and the company more than replaces them in the pipeline with new and better drugs, I see all these issues disappearing. HTT, FXI and Tofersen alone can change everything.