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Biotech / Medical : EntreMed (ENMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Dorsey who wrote (1958)	7/25/1999 12:26:00 AM
From: tommysdad	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2135

I guess I'm looking at the data a little differently. The response to the original (Nature? I believe) article was $15 and change (Nov 97). It did trade in the $19's prior to that, but that was back when almost any biotech traded in the teens (oh, those WERE the days). In the weeks leading up to the May 98 NYTimes article, ENMD was flitting around $11-12. And then of course the spike to $85. {I'm going from memory here, so I may be off a month or so on the dates.} So at current levels, ENMD is about twice as high as it was before a super-nice write-up in the popular press -- not really "barely above". What has changed since the publication of the original research results, besides the hype of the NY Times article? 1) ENMD's corporate partner has pulled out (yeah, I know, not all the way, but essentially that's what happened). 2) A lot of people have had trouble reproducing the results. 3) The fickle-ness of the proteins has been demonstrated (some NIH scientists couldn't reproduce the results in their labs, but they could in Folkman's). 4) AS and ES are still not in the clinic. Back in May/June of '98, I posted that I did not believe the clinicals would start by the end of the year (1998) and was jumped on. Here we are 14 months later, and the first human has yet to be dosed. Will it happen before the end of 1999? My guess is . . . maybe. 5) Thalidomide has advanced quite a bit. 6) ENMD claims to be able to scale the proteins and has a contract in place with Covance. I don't think #5-6 in the face of #1-4 is what is keeping the stock at these levels. IMO, it is the belief that ENMD "will cure cancer in our lifetime". So the shorts (and I am NOT one -- I have never and will never short a company that is trying to cure a disease) don't have to be betting that AS/ES will fail; they simply can bet that these proteins will not be the cure-all so many people hope they will be. That, unfortunately, is a pretty safe bet. "Good but not great results" is by far the most likely scenario. And I would guess that will make the stock drift down.