2010 ASCO Phase IIB Ovarian cancer top line 22% Recist (9-13.6% range) waiting for the survival end points. Also Nktr 102 Phase I data in July. There are 12 drugs in the pipeline moving. On which drug did Barclay down grade on????
Brean Murray Industry Expert Picks Favorite Mergers And Acquisitions Candidates In Biotechnology And Pharmaceutical Sectors Of Healthcare Industry In 2010 And 2011
TWST: What about Nektar?
Dr. Aschoff: Nektar (NKTR) is one of my favorite companies. I had an excellent experience with the CEO and the Chief Operating Officer when they ran Sirna, my best-performing stock. Now Howard Robin is the CEO of the company. He came in, completely altered the company, just like he did at Sirna, and he's taking it in a different direction successfully and getting deals that are far more lucrative than Nektar ever got prior to Howard joining the company in January 2007, which was a month after Merck (MRK) bought Sirna. To come into a platform technology and completely revamp that platform technology to something much more appealing to partners and investors - and he clearly did that - I'm looking for him to sell this company just like he sold Sirna. It's ready to be sold for a specific reason, and that is that this is the only company I know that can reproducibly pegylate or add polymers to small-molecule drugs. This is common with protein drugs, but this company is the only one that can reproducibly do this to small-molecule drugs. And that gives you 20 more years of patent life because you've changed a generic drug, meaning that you've actually covalently bound something to it. You are not putting it in some control-release pill or something like that. When you change the chemistry of it, now it is a new chemical entity and you get a full 20-year patent on it. And they've already done this; they had some great Phase II data. I assume they are going to get some very solid Phase I data from the next cancer drug they'd modified, NKTR-105. And you can take less of those drugs, NKTR-102 and NKTR-105, because you increase the half-life through modifying them. The drugs last almost 50 times, 40 times, 20 times as long as the original versions. So the drug stays in your body for a lot longer than the original drug. I don't know of too many other instances where you get a safety benefit and an efficacy benefit. They are generally at odds with one another - improve one, lose the other. Nektar's pipeline is something that would keep a pharma company busy, altering small-molecule drugs that they know work, but just making them materially better. |
