This is long, take your time.
The Amgen SH meeting was an eye-opener. Although it was very boring and full of propaganda, it was a good place to ask questions.
Throughout the company presentation, it highlighted some of Amgen's
products in development (such as Infergen) and research (such as IL-1). However, there were no mentions of other neurotrophic factors. (NT-3 was shown on one slide but was not discussed) I guess they were a bit ashamed that the progress was not as great.
I was even more surprised that the company did not say a word about the failure of BDNF and its future plan with it, and amazingly, no shareholder seemed to care (i.e., I was the only one to ask questions on bdnf). One shareholder did ask about Amgen's progress on Parkinson disease. The response was that they are working on it with GDNF, and expecting prelimary results by year end.
mz, you are right that I shouldn't expect too much discussion on regn. In fact when I asked Gordon Binder... (these are not direct transcripts, but words that I nervously remember)
Q1: ...A follow up question on your Parkinson trial, and this also applies to BDNF and other neurotrophic factors, Have you considered
using encapsulted cell technology to deliver the trophic factor which are more suitable to the CNS diseases you are dealing with? In fact,
your competitor, Genentech, has already created alliance with
cytotherapeutics to deliver trophic factors using the encapsulated cells implanted in the brain, and has yielded some pretty good results.
A: There are lots of ways to deliver small molecule proteins, that
certainly is one way, but we have decided to go with Medtronics to do
that.
Q2: During the presentation, there was no mention of the failure of BDNF, CNTF, What is the company going to do with them. I understand that you have already started the intrathecal delivery of BDNF for ALS patients, how is that going along?
A: (Binder turns his body and changes his stiff posture, voice a little shakey!) As you might be aware of the fact that our BDNF failed to show efficacy in phase III trial in ALS, I would like to clarify and point out that Amgen did not run the CNTF trial, which also failed. Also, we started the intrathecal, and let me provide some background on this (and went on to talk about using Medtronic's pump and how it is implanted), we started the intrathecal administration of BDNF before we found out the phase III results, and the trial is on going, and no data is available yet. For CNTF, we have a join patent with Regeneron, but we don't have any active research on that at the moment.
Q3: Last question, would you comment on your relationship with Regeneron? Since there've been only dispointments, are you still benefitting from the relationship?
A: (I was totally lost on his answer, he went on to say about Synergen, but sounded like there was nothing new with regn and don't seem like anything thing new in the future. He doesn't seem to care about regn at all. I was pretty disappointed...but wait, there's more...)
Other questions were asked about whether Amgen would offer direct stock purchase program, and a couple qs on the fat drug (the Leptin thing was quite a hot topic), and there were couple "cheerleaders".
Next is the informal Q/A session, i.e., after the meeting was adjourned and people can go up to directors and officers and whatever to ask questions. Since I believed Binder's answers were sometimes elusive and indirect, I started chatting with some manager in the investor relation dept.
Q1 again, and surprisingly, this manager knows Cytotherapeutics and said that the technology is a viable one, however, it is not proven yet. They are aware of the competition, espcially from Genentech, but they decided to go with a more proven technology in Medtronic since the pump is programmable, and you have asssurance of drug dosage and time course. Disadvantages of the encapsulated technology were also mentioned: accessibility (i.e., open brain surgery, especially, what if you want to give the patients a bit more, a replacement, a new cell line, then you need to open up his brain again. You don't have that inconvenience in the pump. A very valid point.), unpredictabel or unreliable release (I don't know about this, I thought the genetically engineered cell can screte factors rather constantly.)
Q2 again, he said he was surprised the results didn't show efficacy vs. phase II, but believe the intrathecal is the way to go. Also mentioned you need a great amount of bdnf for it to work...
Q3 again, and I worded differently, "how is the relationship with
Regeneron? I know that you guys are dumping tons and tons of money in
this company, but everything turned out by them are just failures. Are you still benefitting from them, is the relationship worth having?"
A: "of course we enjoy our relationship, we have great confidence in the Regeeron team. You know they have some of the top scientists... we will continue to work with them." (this sounds real good and upbeat!)
Q: If you value them so much, and also it seems like your pipeline in
neurobiology is a little lacking, do you think is good idea to bring
Regeneron's research in house to complement your neruo-research?
A: No, our neuro prgram is going well...we have close working
relationship with Regeneron, I don't see the need to. Of course people can speculate the buy-out anytime.
My final comment, while Binder was not necessarily the guy to ask
questions, I found his staff to be very approachable and knowledgeable, thumbs up to them. I think I got the answers I wanted. Mission accomplished. Cheers to amgn, regn and ctii they should do well in times to come.
Chuck |
