ENMD:
I followed the Company for sometime and familiar with their potential products. I did not read NYT carefully (I new all facts at least last Dec), but I did not find anything unusual. Nothing new (something new you would expect in sci journals). Watson never advartised himself as great angiogenesis or cancer therapy expert and is it really so important what old man told to correspondent during the dinner? Natl. Cancer Inst. is really focusing on angio-endostatin project and for a good reason: it seems to be the only real progress in cancer treatment this century.
Of course, nothing is so simple. Mouse is somehow different from human, and that Folkman emph. all the time, BTW such remark exists in NYT paper also. Folkman's theory is great, but you can't patent it or sell. The theory is more than 25 years old and sci community is familiar with it. Other companies will do their best to find other angiostatics, and they may be more successful than Folkman (and ENMD). IBM is not the only computer's manufacturer.
There are also some tech problems. Proteins are not necesserely the best drugs.Problem with production (especially in ENMD case), administration (majority of them will be destroyed in the digest. tract), storage (to avoid bacterial growth, for examle) and so on. So called "small molecules" which could immitate proteins but have no "protein's problems" may be much better choice.
Well, to bore you is not the aim of this post. I did not find anything unusual or specifically unethical in this article. All reports about science are not ideal. Scientists and journalists have different aims and not always understand each other.Several numbers from report "Worlds Apart: How the distance between Science and Journalism threatens America's future", (1998): only 2% of scientists trust TV,72% of scientists want the public to know about their work, but 41% are affraid to be embarrassed by what news stories might report. Among journalists, 39% rarely or never seek independent verificatio for the science story they are writing.
And exactly about our case: 82% of scientists think that the media are more interested in sensationalism than scientific truth.
82% of scientists think that the US public believes in miracle cures or easy solutions.
Conclusion: this paper was an average one. We have never seen reaction like that on the market. Well, GERN was of this kind, but scale was incomparable. Investors are placing their market orders after they watched TV or looked at the newspaper. Never mind that millions of others watched the same. You can make your own conclusions about their investment experience and logic. That's the driving force of today market. Mad Cow market. And old quest: why not many make money on market crash? Imagine, you could be short ENMD "Green Monday"...
Have a good night.
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