Agreed - I am no expert but believe I have heard of drugs approved in Europe before the FDA. Any jurisdiction approved in should be marketable. A lot of smaller jurisdictions just rely on the FDA for approval, I believe but lots do it on their own. 

As far as HL going to market with Apabetalone, it would be good for them but some have posted before that they felt it was too big a bite for HL. I haven't looked in depth at their finances but this might be possible or maybe not. One thing to consider with regard to this is that HL let their ROFR expire in April. Yes, it easily could have been too early to make a major deal but for maybe another $8 million, they could have extended the ROFR for another year and then they would know. Either they chose to not or RVX wouldn't give it. We know that RVX could have really used that money and it wouldn't really have had much down side for them so it is hard to imagine that they didn't want it.

It has been posted in the past that a ROFR hinders negotiations with other bidding Pharmas. This is really not true. Any Pharma that wants RVX would just have to outbid HL. They have to do that whether there is a ROFR or not. They just go high enough for HL to back off. If HL wants it bad enough, they just always keep matching the bid and it is theirs. They appear to have chosen to not spend a relatively small amount to insure they win out so maybe they don't want that and prefer the cash shorter term. That is not bad business either.

With just rough numbers, if they invested $100 million and in a short term buyout, received $2 billion or $3 billion ($20 or $30/share) cash to add to their balance sheet, that is not bad business, especially if the deal is deemed to be too big for them right now. Maybe when they took the ROFR a couple of years ago, they were mainly pricing in a CVD success but as hype grew for CKD and cognition, they decided it was too big. Who knows what they are thinking?

I am not trying to say this is what it is, just making sure we look at all possibilities. The fact is that the ROFR was not extended.