Annex A
Dear Fellow Stockholders:
As Chairman of
Galectin Therapeutics, once again I wanted to address you directly.
On April 15
th
the Company announced the record date, closing date and pricing of the rights offering. I wanted to share my thoughts about the offering and our rationale for the pricing. Also, I felt I should describe, from my perspective, how the offering will
work.
As I have previously expressed, in advocating for the rights offering to the board as our first option, my sole intention was to
limit dilution to you, my
co-investors.
The board and management agreed with me that a rights offering is the most democratic method of raising money. While there are many different financing options, I wanted
to pick the one that I believe favors the existing stockholders.
Simply put, at this point in our history, we need to fund our
Phase-3
clinical trial in patients with NASH cirrhosis. Not many companies are fortunate enough to advance a new drug compound this far. Today we are well advanced into the trial design, and we are looking forward
to getting the trial underway. For that I want to thank our team led by our CEO, Harold Shlevin, and our employees and researchers. I am a long-term investor who clearly believes in the Company but joining the board has given me a new degree of
respect and understanding of the complexity involved in the clinical trial process. I am extremely grateful to all involved.
I want to
reiterate the conviction of my commitment to the Company on several levels. My invitation to our stockholders is to make an investment along side of me in a science-driven enterprise. I take all investments, including money and time, extremely
seriously, and I urge everyone to do the same. This is especially the case for me in this endeavor because I am the Boards Chairman.
My belief in the Company, the Board, management and our team, is in addition to my belief in and the commitment to our science. Neither I as
Chairman nor our Board has or can make a recommendation to you about whether
you
should invest. However, speaking as the Companys largest individual stockholder, I felt it was important to state my rationale for my personal investment
in this rights offering.
After reviewing reports of our Phase 2 data and the researchers comments with respect to our outcome, I
was extremely encouraged. A statistically meaningful reduction in portal pressure measured by HVPG has never been observed in a Phase 2 NASH trial in any patient population. While we obtained this outcome in only a subsection of our trial
participants, it was, and is, a meaningful population.
Additionally, the most promising data from my perspective, and, not
coincidentally, the primary endpoint in our Phase 3 trial, was the potential to prevent varices in NASH patients who had yet to develop them. This also has never been achieved in any Phase 2 NASH trial. These are not only my words or beliefs. Please
read the comments made by our research team and analysts (See page 3/10 in our December 2017 Annual Meeting Presentation).