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Biotech / Medical : XOMA. Bull or Bear? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Biomaven who wrote (10699)	7/9/1999 12:19:00 AM
From: aknahow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17367

Peter many of us agree that Neuprex is the main event. But the deal for Mycoprex is still an important item. Over 17 companies have signed cell expression agreements with XOMA and there are a dozen more talking deals. The hu1124 results might stimulate others to look at the XOMA huminization technology. In addition to fees XOMA gets royalties on any products that eventually hit the market for both humanization and cell expression technology use. Also Neuprex is a big subject. It might be just the P III unblinding which is considered the driver. There has always been lots of debate over the value of partnerships and so finally we have a company with a P III completed, and fairly good prospects of approval. Would think that's worth at lot more than a biotech that gave away 75% of the product to a partner. If you have not read the Endotoxin paper on the XOMA site it might be worth it. I am not 100% sure that the paper is an independent paper. The stock may not have done so great but their web site is several 100% above all the rest of the biotechs.

To: Biomaven who wrote (10699)	7/9/1999 2:34:00 PM
From: aknahow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17367

Yes, and I think those that have a greater understanding of the science are most apt to believe XOMA is a one product company, that has simply sliced and diced BPI. Thus if Neuprex does not work in the Meningo. trial it will be a 0 instead of a 1. I have seen and thought about the argument, by someone I respect, that selling a product at a high price that bleaches cotton and later is discovered to also kill weeds, at a lower cost than competing prices for weed killers, becomes difficult to market. (To the original poster, excuse my total bastardization of your post), I at least remembered the thrust, or at least thought I did). But the Allergan deal is very instructive. Sure they got the rights to rBPI21, but these rights are restricted just to its use in conjunction with antibiotic products for ophthalmic use. Don't think any lawyer would have a hard time drawing up a restrictive contract making sure this was clearly spelled out. So even in this limited slice XOMA was able to keep the anti-angiogenesis properties for itself. Is Mycoprex a derivative of BPI, as lay person I would say yes. Can it be developed as a separate product? They are doing just that. Then there are the anti protozoan properties. So, frankly I don't see XOMA as such a binary bet. They have not partnered out for global use of BPI and I hope they never do.

To: Biomaven who wrote (10699)	7/10/1999 5:02:00 PM
From: aknahow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17367

peter, here is cut and paste from the XOMA site. I know the feeling of trying to make sense of a biotech that I have not followed. Think, those with a technical background do have an advantage. I loved SEPR from the start. I understood the business concept not the science. But I got worried out of the stock early on, and I had had a nice position. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Castellos comments>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Historically, what pharmaceutical companies did was try to find a cure for sepsis, the area inside the center white circle. But if you look at sepsis in the context of the underlying disease states, a couple of things become apparent. For many of these diseases, there is a high percentage of underlying mortality. It's no surprise to anybody that people die of heart disease, cancer or infections, whether or not they progress to sepsis. So curing their sepsis will not necessarily demonstrate a mortality benefit in a clinical trial. Sepsis patients are also a very heterogeneous patient population with a lot of variables. So even with very large trials, it's hard to sort out the effects of all this variability. These are some of the reasons why we felt, in the early '90s, that doing another sepsis trial, trying to cover the inner white circle, didn't make sense. At the same time, we had a very exciting molecule, called BPI, and were trying to figure out how to get our first BPI-derived product, NEUPREX®, to market without stumbling down the same road that more than a dozen companies have now been down. I believe these companies have enrolled a total of about 13,000 patients in sepsis trials and there hasn't been any trial product that succeeded through phase III. And it isn't because the drugs don't work, it's because they targeted too broad an indication. So what did we do? We approached this market in a very focused way to target clean patient populations. We started with a pediatric disease, meningococcemia. We picked off little pieces of the pie. Why did we pick them? The idea is that in each case there is a discrete patient population that allows us to do a clean clinical trial that hopefully can give us a successful conclusion. And that's basically our clinical strategy. It's a legitimate question to ask "How many little pieces of pie do we have to cut to demonstrate the product works before it can be used for the whole circle?" That's yet to be seen. But as you can see by the indications shown, we are gradually going around the circle. Its a long process, but one that gives us a better possibility of winning in the end, instead of trying to get it all in one bite.