SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a 2024 press release, “The Division of Enforcement is a steadfast cop on the beat, following the facts and the law wherever they lead to hold wrongdoers accountable.”

Volk told Michigan News Source that he thinks the goal of the SEC’s enforcement tactics is to get a company to settle whether it’s personally or through an insurance company. According to attorneys at Winston & Strawn, LLP, about 98% of the SEC’s enforcement actions end in settlement with the remaining proceeding to litigation and adjudication. For context, in fiscal year 2024 (the most recent full year available as of September 2025), the SEC filed 583 enforcement actions, the majority of which were settled concurrently with filing or shortly thereafter.

Reven’s Response.

Reven calls the SEC’s numbers in their complaint against them inflated and misleading. In court filings, the defense points to a third-party forensic analysis concluding that the principals were actually owed more in unpaid, board-approved compensation than the SEC claims they “took.” Denomme says that his answer to the charge of the misappropriation of funds is that “You cannot misappropriate money that is owed to you.”

Disputed charges like multi-user American Express bills, the company says, reflect ordinary business expenses. And Health Analytics, Reven insists, provided legitimate consulting services and sometimes served as a tax or payment conduit, not a sham. Executives also note they put their own funds into the company and disclosed broad discretion over the use of proceeds in offering documents.

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Attorneys for the company principals chalk up discrepancies in executive pay disclosures to typos and claim the company never meant to promise hard deadlines on milestones. They allege that any missteps were “immaterial” and negligent at worst, not intentional fraud. They also state that they were working on correcting accounting deficiencies before the public listing could happen.

And notably, the defense counsel argues the government’s narrative leans heavily on two hostile shareholder witnesses whose deposition testimony later walked back earlier claims they had made in their affidavits that were used in the SEC’s complaint. Statements once described as “promises” of a public offering, for example, were reframed as “that’s all they talked about.” These shareholder witnesses,  Lee-Ann Frost and Leah Schaatt, are women who, Reven alleges in a court filing “hatched a plot to usurp Reven’s management or intellectual property” with Reven’s former Chief Technology Officer, Dr. James Ervin, and were “actively working…to develop a competing business venture.”

According to the company executives, the Frost family arranged a meeting with a senior Merck official in August 2021; afterward, they say that the Frosts relayed that Reven was “on Merck’s radar” and that “everything checked out.” No follow-up meeting materialized, and the next major development was an SEC subpoena. Reven principals now speculates – while emphasizing it cannot prove the link – that the sequence may be connected.

Additionally, Lange said, “The four of us built this company” and “we did it for under a hundred million dollars.” He added, “That’s just unfathomable and I think that’s another reason why everybody’s trying to stop us because you don’t have to spend a billion dollars (to develop a drug).”

The freeze that stopped the lab.

The Jan. 3, 2023 TRO (temporary restraining order) – later converted into a preliminary injunction – froze Reven’s assets and those of its principals without notice, effectively shutting down the company overnight. Operations ceased, employees left, and patents lapsed. Reven says it first learned of the freeze only when the TRO took effect.

In civil enforcement cases, the SEC can ask a federal judge for an emergency TRO and preliminary injunction to preserve assets while the lawsuit proceeds. Judges grant freezes when regulators show early evidence of securities violations and a risk that money could be hidden, spent, or moved beyond reach. These court orders are meant to preserve the status quo pending a full hearing on the merits.

However, in May 2024, more than a year after the freeze was put into effect, the district court itself acknowledged that the freeze in its current form was causing the value of Reven’s assets to dissipate, rather than be preserved.

Reven’s filings over time paint a grim picture: patent fees went unpaid, study partners pulled out, and Phase 2 data may now require costly duplication. “Reven’s current investors and shareholders are in limbo as they watch a company they believed in slowly suffocate,” Reven’s attorney wrote in a June 2023 brief.

For the principals, the prolonged limbo is intolerable – they want their day in court to present evidence and move the case forward because they have never been able to argue the merits of the case in front of a judge.

Fighting for the company, RJX and the shareholders.

As the SEC’s asset freeze dragged on, the principals at Reven refused to quit fighting. They have had their attorneys file motions again and again, determined to salvage both their patents and their future. They argued that without judicial relief, irreplaceable intellectual property – covering a drug already three-quarters of the way through Phase 2 trials – would simply expire, erasing years of pre-clinical work, regulatory approvals, and patient treatments.

In the Fall of 2023, patents began to lapse. Reven filed a supplemental motion highlighting irreparable harm from the SEC freeze. SEC opposed Reven’s motion by stating that the loss of assets are “irrelevant” to the case.

For Reven, protecting RJX meant more than defending a balance sheet – it meant holding onto the scientific foundation of a drug they believed could save lives. They refused to let what they saw as a governmental overreach be the final say.

A constitutional test case.

In August 2024, Reven escalated the fight by suing the U.S. government in the Court of Federal Claims. The lawsuit argues the freeze amounts to a per se taking under the Fifth Amendment because it destroyed specific property rights – including patents, data, and cash – without compensation.

Written in Reven’s court filing titled “complaint for taking without just compensation,” it says, “The SEC’s sweeping freeze of Reven’s assets has backfired, destroying rather than preserving Reven’s valuable corporate property interests.” Even the DOJ in the Court of Federal Claims proceedings conceded, under questioning by Judge Horn in 2025, that this was “definitely a taking.” However, according to Reven, the DOJ then tried to reframe it as a “judicial taking,” an action arising from a court’s injunction rather than direct executive or legislative regulation.

Attorney Nancie G. Marzulla, who represents Reven in its takings lawsuit, told Michigan News Source that the government has asked the court to dismiss the case, but no ruling has been issued yet. A takings case argues that the government’s actions amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of private property without just compensation, as prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. If Reven is allowed to move forward and ultimately prevails, damages would be calculated by comparing the company’s value before and after the SEC’s asset freeze – an outcome that could translate into a significant financial award.

Marzulla calls the SEC’s actions a “clear cut case of an agency that just sort of went off off the rails” and is damaging the very investors it says it’s trying to protect. She added that the SEC is not supposed to be “in the business of destroying companies and businesses and valuable property rights” and that instead of protecting investors, their actions had the “opposite effect” and destroyed the very assets they are supposed to be protecting.

Where the original SEC case stands.

Nearly four years after the SEC began investigating Reven – and close to three years since the TRO and asset freeze were put in place – Defense counsel John E. Schreiber of Winston & Strawn LLP says the case is still “in a holding pattern” as the Tenth Circuit weighs Reven’s appeal of the preliminary injunction. In the meantime, discovery continues, draining a company with no access to capital.

Back in November 2021, when the SEC first launched its investigation, the principals voluntarily turned over more than 100 GB of data, documents, contracts, and communications without even knowing what the issue was.

Since then, the company has produced a third-party forensic analysis that contradicts the SEC’s accusations, and two key witnesses – shareholders Frost and Schaatt – have appeared to have walked back parts of their earlier claims in their depositions. Even so, the SEC continues to stand by its fraud narrative and, as of publication, has not responded to our requests for comment.

The stakes.

The future of Reven and RJX now depends on outcomes in two courtrooms: a Colorado federal court where the SEC’s fraud case could head to trial (or the freeze could be lifted) – and the Court of Federal Claims where Reven’s takings suit could set a precedent for how far federal regulators can go without giving Americans due process and just compensation.

A win for Reven could fund a “second act,” revive trials, or at least reimburse investors. A win for the SEC could leave RJX as a cautionary tale of how fast government overreach and enforcement can erase a decade of science and easily destroy an American company. Until rulings come down, nothing moves – not the lab, not the patents, not the balance sheet. Between those outcomes sit thousands of shareholders, lapsed intellectual property, and a drug designed to quiet the body’s worst internal storms and save countless lives.

Volk’s closing words of the interview capture the heart of the company’s battle. Speaking to Michigan News Source, he said, “Our message is that we’re trying to do the right thing and we’re trying to get a drug to market to save lives…Even if we fail, I can say that me, Peter, Brian and Andy – we literally did everything within our power to take care of our shareholders and try to get them the returns that we promised them. And we have done everything in our power to try to get a life and limb saving drug to market. And, you know, when you work as hard as we have to do something, to ultimately just watch it evaporate like we have, with no ability to do anything about it, it’s heartbreaking. Our whole life’s work has been to get this drug to market.”

Volk’s words distilled the long struggle into its simplest truth. Beyond the filings, the accusations, and the fight to protect their life’s work, the company’s leaders insist their mission has never wavered: “We just want to save lives.”