These are my impressions of the annual shareholders' meeting (my fifth) :
Marr is not nearly as impressive a speaker as Malcolm Gefter or Robert Gerrety, but because he comes across as very honest and sincere, it may actually be an advantage to have him presenting the company's case (I say this because I brought somebody from the telecommunications industry to the meeting last year and he told me after the meeting that he thought Gerrety was "arrogant").
Marr touched upon the 4 big questions that I have at this point, i.e.
1. How do we "take out" the placebo effect from the data from the ragweed trials? In the trial commencing this July, there will be a concerted effort to make sure that the subject population consists of the more seriously allergic patients (last years' data showed that they benefit more from the vaccine and that they show less placebo effect). The overall results from the trial should then show a greater percentage benefit of the vaccine over the placebo.
2. What about a partner for tha allervax line ? Marr claims that he met with potential partners this past winter in Europe. But, as someone in this discussion group has already pointed out, no one is willing to commit mega millions to IMUL until the results from this years' cat and ragweed trials are in. My response is what is wrong with these people? Marion Merrill Dow committed to this technology in 1992, years before the vaccines were shown to be safe and effective in humans.
3.Is the competition gaining on us as we diddle with the FDA? Ironically this weeks The Scientist (Vol. 11, no. 10 12 May 1997) has an article that starts on the first page, lower left, entitled "Researchers Find Opportunities Sniffing Out Allergy Treatments" that talks about the various new treatments, including Immulogic's. Marr was asked about monoclonal antibodies that bind to IgE as a viable alternative to IMUL's T cell anergy approach. He downplayed this approach as a real danger to IMUL's prospects because shutting off IgE in the human body could have unknown side effects and because this therapy would require repeated administrations, unlike IMUL's one-shot therapy (actually something like 8 little shots over 2 weeks).
4. What about the cocaine and MS programs? Here I thought Marr did a good job of representing the company. He was being hectored by a fellow from the Harvard Management Group, i.e. Harvard's money, about why in the world the company would not commit to bringing these 2 programs into the human clinic in the next year as "corporate goals". Marr explained how IMUL is a little "gun shy"(my words) about bringing anything into human clinical trials until the company is confident that it can give it its best shot (no pun intended). IMUL is still doing research to determine how to maximize the potency of the cocaine vaccine and to determine the best administration route of the MS vaccine (oral, nasal, etc). The company is also under tremendous pressure to commence the ragweed trial in 2 months, and to do it right, and it would not be in the best interest of the company to rush into other trials without doing its homework.
What does all of this mean to the stock price at this time? As has already been suggested in this group, unless there is an unexpected article in the Wall Street Journal about the promise of IMUL's vaccines, I would expect money invested in IMUL to be "dead" money until the end of this year. There should be some interest by then in the investment community as trial results should be released next January. Assuming the results are positive, there then should be more interest as a new corporate partner should emerge by this time next year.
Best regards. |
