I am a bit surprised at the wrath of your response and your apparent hostility towards this company. There was nothing in my post to engender such an attitude. It leads me to suspect that you had studied Ariad in the past and simply failed to spot the potential in ARGENT and the leverage therein. The other thing in your reply is your portrayal of your opinions as fact. For instance, your entire first paragraph is a mix between opinion and misperceptions about Ariad. I claim there IS indeed a genomics/gene therapy subsector in that many of the companies conducting genomics are closely associated with programs to use the result of their genomics analysis in therapeutics. In your view 'Genomics and gene therapy are very different pursuits'. In my view, while they are methodologically distinct, they are inextricably linked since one (genomics) feeds the other and can determine the potential applications of gene therapy. If a company has a foothold in genomics AND in a program developing gene therapeutic approaches, which makes infinite sense, then they will be a very strong position
You also state that Ariad is the only gene therapy company in the list. You must know, if you are familiar with the company to any degree, that they are only recent arrivals at gene therapy. Not only was it their original intent via the joint venture with HMR to use functional genomics, combinatorial chemistry etc. to develop small molecule drugs which interact with signal transduction pathways, but their functional genomics research is very much alive. They've had their collaborative effort for gene therapy, an effort almost completely farmed out (inserting ARGENT into AAV, clinical details) to James Wilson and Genovo, for ~3 years. And recall that as part of the buyout by HMR, Ariad retained the rights to all of the methodologies and compounds resulting from the SH2 and SH3 work.
Your other statements about the company and the stock movement can be applied to so many other situations, especially in the type of stock market we've had in the last couple of years, so as to be essentially meaningless. Again I detect some sort of vendetta or hostility that is selectively vented here. You say 'It broke out on the back of old news, in a press release that was timed to induce trading.' The company has been releasing news stories about ARGENT for years. It released the details of the Keystone talk ~12 hours before the talk was given. The ARGENT patent (6,011,018) was issued 1/4/00 whereas the one for apoptosis (5,994,313) is dated 11/30/99. The company issued a press release for both on 1/11/00. They had the ARGENT patent in their hands for one week and you call this 'timing'. Even if 'timing' were the case, how many dozens of companies practice obnoxious behavior - which can only be deemed PR - during this H&Q week. But, in the end, your statement was simply incorrect: the issuance of the patents was NEW news, the repeated statements that a partnership was pending was NEW news, and the fact the ARGENT was fully functional in primates for 450 days (Keystone) was NEW news.
You say 'Traders have been running it ever since, and the CEO is fanning the flames. It's mania, driven largely by those who don't know squat about what they're trading or holding.' I mean really Richard. How many times are you frustrated with the ignorance level of investors in just about any biotechnology company? Sure, there are some informed folks here at SI, but you KNOW what an exception that is. Is it Ariad's 'fault' that momentum traders have latched on to the stock. For ALL the stocks I listed in my previous post, where 12 out of 14 had gains over 100% in 3 months, you know the claim of 'ignorant day traders' could be applied. When it is stated 'a sector is hot', such as this field/sector is, that is synonymous with saying, 'here come the ignorant day traders'. Convince me that Incyte or Celera or Curagen or any of the others don't have the same quotient of ignorant day traders as Ariad. And how many of those companies have had CEOs make making what, in your view, could be construed as 'fanning the flames' statements during this 3 month run? If this is a mania, then the umbrella covers all these companies, not just Ariad. And NONE of these companies are particularly cheap either.
I'm neither in love with stock - who could be after all these years - nor is it a huge investment of mine. But I do, and will continue to, acknowledge when a company such as Ariad makes a turnaround and is on the path towards realizing some long terms goals. This obviously goes beyond the osteoporosis drug: it includes the very real potential of ARGENT. And let's not forget that Ariad has been giving ARGENT away to research labs for years. Thus there is much more 'silent' data on ARGENT than is published. And with the recent acknowledgement that at least one other commercial genomics company (I believe it was Hyseq) was using the reagent in its work, the applied user pool is likely to expand rapidly. Of course, that is my opinion, as were the statements in your post.
As stated elsewhere, Ariad: the company everyone loves to hate. |
