Greetings to all who post on Paracelsian!
My name is Jonathan Schonsheck. I have been a stockholder of Paracelsian for about a year - and "What a long, strange trip it has been."
Although I did a small amount of consulting work for our Company in the past, my only relationship with the Company now is that I am a stockholder. The views and analyses I post are solely my own, exercising my First Amendment rights, and must not be taken as statements of the Company.
Perhaps the place to begin is with the most famous line from "Prizzi's Honor:" "If we're so ***** smart, how come we're so ***** dead?"
In my judgement, the Company has not yet overcome two distinct but related problems of communication.
The first is that the Company must be exceedingly careful to say nothing about either AndroVir or AndroCar that would lead the FDA to claim that these are "drugs," rather than dietary supplements. Were that to happen, they could not be marketed as dietary supplements (scheduled for March-ish), and we would face years of expensive testing. This is not in our interests. This caution precludes the Comany's officially announcing virtually anything that is interesting and exciting.
The second problem is that the Company is "rhetorically challenged;" their press releases teem with technical terms (that are unexplained), and are generally difficult to decipher. In consequence, few people (=investors) understand just what the Company has achieved - and that's why we're so ***** dead.
The Company believed that the December 12 Press Release about AndroVir was "good news." As I wrote to them, they do not release "good news" per se: they merely release "news." They have failed to communicate if the news is not understood as good news. And they did fail to communicate; after a brief rise, the stock fell by the end of the day.
One example of the second sort of problem: the rise in serum cholesterol of the trial's subjects. As a nonscientist, I understood that to be a negative effect of AndroVir; only by reading this thread did I learn that it was a positive effect. (The December 12 P.R. is available at the Paracelsian Home Page, Paracelsian.com; click on "Press Releases.")
And now to the second problem. Why was the world so unimpressed with the results announced on December 12? The main problem, I believe, is "irrational exuberance" about protease inhibitors. (To no small extent, this is fueled by Time's naming Dr. Ho its Man of the Year.) Too many people believe that protease inhibitors work for everyone, and that they reduce the viral load to "undetectable." Given that expectation, the reductions achieved by AndroVir do not look too impressive.
We are now seeing some "reality checks" on protease inhibitors; read the front page article in The New York Times, Sunday, January 19, 1997. They do not work for everyone, they have very nasty side effects, they are very expensive. And suppose one were to compare them with AndroVir, on a similar population, over the same time period. (See The New England Journal of Medicine, December 7, 1995, p. 1534-39.) AndroVir's reduction of viral load was comparable. However, the improvement in CD4 cells - an essential component of the immune system - was much greater with AndroVir. And note the charts on page 1534; they suggest that the virus was mutating around the protease inhibitors.
So: is AndroVir a "competitor" of protease inhibitors? Yes and no. It is a competitor, for those who cannot endure the side effects of protease inhibitors, or who cannot afford them, or in cases of their failure. But AndroVir need not be a competitor; it can be used with them, and with reverse transcriptase inhibitors (like AZT).
AndroVir's mechanism of action is quite different from these. Both RT inhibitors and protease inhibitors attack the virus directly. A part of Paracelsian's research under the CRADA with the National Cancer Institute has been the development of a model of HIV-1 replication and HIV-1 destruction of the immune system. One of the discoveries is that the virus requires a particular kinase, "c-mos," in order to replicate, and in order to kill immune system cells. It gets c-mos by forcing immune cells to produce it. Labatory work showed that the dietary supplement AndroVir inhibits the expression of c-mos by immune system cells. This laboratory work was confirmed by the Bastyr trial. This indicates AndroVir's potential as an element of a "combinational" therapy. Not only does it reduce viral load, but it does so in a way that is fundamentally different from that of other components. This reduces the probability that the virus will be able to "mutate around" the cocktail. The increase in CD4 cells observed in this trial shows that AndroVir supports a healthy immune system. Thus it is a candidate for the "ideal" cocktail.
What is the market for AndroVir? People not using protease inhibitors (for whatever reason), and people using protease inhibitors (to enhance their effectiveness in a cost-effective way).
My prediction: When investors come to realize this, PRLN will no longer be a $2.00 stock.
Jonathan |
