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Biotech / Medical : ARIAD Pharmaceuticals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gunter RICHTER who wrote (668)	9/1/1999 7:53:00 AM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4474

What does Ariad have? Great science: A gene therapy regulation system that works. After some tuning (rapamycin), and maybe a bit more work on the vector by Genovo, ARGENT will go into clinical trials in the next year or so. There was a little confusion about the dimerizer versus the Gene Therapy...but I think the point was best clarified by "vanderrhoe" in Yahoo post 1167 Also, you guys must know exactly what Phase I was testing: was it ARGENT transfection of human T cells and inducible expression, was it tolerance of the latest generation of the dimerizer...? (I'll clue you in: the latter is now sitting pretty, the former is my real question. Is transfection PII?) So great, ARIA has ARGENT...and an able partner in Genovo, also a smattering of interesting exclusive and non-exclusive liceneces with the best and brightest. However, Ariad might also have some competition--something not often discussed are other regulation schemes out there --GMED, now Valentis has something...what other "Gene switches" are out there? ______________________________________________ Shitty financing: Of course Ariad also seems to have a management which is either very bold, or very stupid--as far as financing. I suspect it is not possible to hang around molecular biologists if one is very stupid--you will be quickly found out and shamed, so let's assume managment is pretty smart. We know Ariad has had a very good BOD, there is no doubt in my mind that because of them Ariad has signed some good deals and has captured some good IP. So, if management ain't dumb, then it is possible that they've actually been very sneaky with the finances. Yes, if looks and quacks like dilution, sure it's dilution, and yes, it has done horrible things to the stock price. My guess is that the convertible shares will come online over the next six months, and that, combined with tax loss selling will keep the stock down around these levels--probably around 3/4 by 7/8--there could even be further talk of dilisting etc etc. I say 3/4ths because there has been no attempt to support the price yet, and if 85 cents is breached this month, more toxic crap occurs. I wish I'd been slower to accumulate my shares, but then I thought it was in their interest to keep the price above a buck, maybe not. Certainly not if you want ultra cheap shares--traders and money managers alike often have to dump positions when they drop below a buck or the chance of delisting comes up. I too may still be stopped out by the current slide. So, if they're being sneaky, then this would be the perfect environment in which to accumulate shares, and I feel like an ass for having an average cost of 1 1/4. However, I feel good about the chance of seeing ARIA up around $4 eventually, and of course with no more B.S. financing and with any clinical success, ARIA is easy ten bagger material. But at the least, if things go pretty well, then I'll take $4--the Science article was able to generate enough interest to do that briefly, I don't see why that could not happen again. If Ariad stops doing bad financing and insiders clean up the millions of shares puked up, then I will survive. But I don't have to like it. There is also a chance I'm hoping beyond hope the the stock has been manipulated down--when I first started yapping about my consipiracy theory, somebody might have PMed me and to say "shhhh". But that never happened. So mostly I worry that I screwed up in buying tons of ARIA, and I'm mostly ashamed of being in the warrants.