Get Ready for a Biotech Frenzy
By Lissa Morgenthaler
Special to TheStreet.com
Originally posted at 4:21 PM ET 8/28/00 on RealMoney.com
What a rush! The RealMoney gang said that because I did a good job running my mutual fund for the first half of this year, I could come play with them during summer vacation. Now that biotech has more than 420 public companies and a market cap north of $400 billion, they think it's not just for girly men anymore. RealMoney.com columnist Gabe Hoffman and TSC staff reporter Dane Hamilton are obviously studs; you'd think the other guys would have figured it out sooner. (The fact that biotech is up 81% year to date probably got their attention.)
So here I am --- just in time for the unofficial start of the autumn biotech frenzy.
And did you see the kickoff last week?
The trigger was the issuance of funding guidelines for stem-cell research by the National Institute of Health. And the starting gun was fired by President Clinton when he commented publicly that stem-cell research has enormous potential for fighting disease.
There's such a nice symmetry to all this. Clinton tanked the biotech sector on March 14, plus he and Al Gore have been kicking health care companies on a semimonthly basis ever since. (Al gave biotech a solid hit just recently after his knock on pharmaceutical companies during the Democrat Convention's closing night.)
But then Clinton sanctioned federal funding of research on stem cells, including those derived from frozen embryos that are to be discarded. This time when he kicked biotech he happened to be facing the goalposts. Up it went. And it was good! (The biotech indices haven't been this high in more than a month and they'll presumably break through their highs of mid-July before the end of this move.)
All this didn't happen in a vacuum, of course. Some of the U.K. biotech companies clarified their stance on stem cells two weeks ago. (Upshot: They're willing to clone human organs but not humans.) Meanwhile, the institutions have been gorging on biotech IPO candy this summer --- and now they've gotten back to the main course. Robertson Stephens' Mike King focused their minds by running a very select visit to Millennium Pharmaceutical (MLNM:Nasdaq - news) last week (at which Millennium wouldn't allow more than 20 people, so clients were fighting to get on the tour.) Then King initiated coverage of Human Genome Sciences (HGSI:Nasdaq - news) with a buy rating -- which was the first stock to really move in biotech's big run late last week, and closed up about $20.
Technically, this was all very timely. The AMEX and Nasdaq Biotech Indices have been hanging around their 50-day moving averages, which formed a little plateau two weeks ago. When we see that, no matter how bearish we are, we figure the stocks are headed up because they simply refuse to go down. (GBS, what do you see when you look at those flat spots in the Biotechnology Index (BTK.X:INDEX - news) and the Combined Biotech Index (IXBTX:INDEX - news)?)
Then we heard the Investors Intelligence sentiment numbers last Wednesday, which are a measure of newsletter writers' attitudes toward the stock market. Having been a writer for a newsletter, I can't believe anybody pays attention to newsletter sentiment, let alone quantifying it. But Dame Meisler was dead right in her column last week: 43.8% bulls is a startlingly low number and suggested some sort of short-term bottom.
Add in thin summer trading, which provides ripe conditions for someone with enough cash to yank biotech in one direction or another. We noticed this when we bought some Celera (CRA:NYSE - news) for our mutual fund and couldn't do it without moving the stock big time. The traders we deal with are going nuts trying to get stuff done.
So along comes the stem-cell announcement and bang! We were grateful for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we have buys on both Geron (GERN:Nasdaq - news) and Nexell Therapeutics (NEXL:Nasdaq - news) in our newsletters. At the moment, we think they have the strongest intellectual property portfolio in the stem cell arena, though there will be lots of players.
Geron has rights to, among other things, the Scottish nuclear transfer technology that created Dolly the sheep (although Geron shares many of those rights with PPL Therapeutics in the U.K.). And Nexell's goal is to industrialize the process of gathering, manipulating, and growing up stem cells. (If you remember the two little French boys from last May who had gene therapy and were still doing well 10 months later, that experiment used Nexell's ISOLEX system.)
CNBC focused on a couple of other companies last week: Aastrom Biosciences (ASTM:Nasdaq - news) and StemCells (STEM:Nasdaq - news). Aastrom and Nexell are fairly direct competitors. I liked Aastrom very much when Cowen took them public several years ago, but it worries me that neither Geron nor Nexell have felt the need to cross-license with Aastrom. And StemCells is a homeboy for me (based in Sunnyvale, Calif.) This company is the old CytoTherapeutics, which was based in Rhode Island and focused on diseases of the central nervous system.
There are several other companies in the field that didn't get mentioned, including Incara (INCR:Nasdaq - news) which has some technology related to liver progenitor cells. But altogether the kickoff of the fall biotech frenzy was great fun. It should run pretty smoothly until the BioCentury/Carson Group conference on Sept. 7. That's sort of the first financial confab of the season and it was the venue where Genentech and Idec Pharmaceuticals (IDPH:Nasdaq - news) last year let it be known that sales of their monoclonal antibody Rituxan were light. (That revelation started a biotech sag that lasted until nearly November.)
And as the lockups come off the 50+ recent biotech IPOs and secondaries (thank you Ben Holmes), we figure there'll be at least $10 billion worth of overhang coming into the market. So there'll be the usual element of picking your way through biotech land mines this fall. But with Celera due to publish its semiannotated sequence of the human genome (probably next month) and a ton of clinical data due to report, we are looking forward to this fall with relish.
(Or is that only in baseball?) |
