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

To: scott_jiminez who wrote (1190)	5/26/2000 8:33:00 AM
From: opalapril	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4474

"The government should NOT loosen its regulatory leverage in the biotech industry. The players in this sector simply cannot be trusted to conduct themselves without bias or to present their data objectively." Actually, we don't disagree on this either. Perhaps I wasn't clear. When I said '10 years, millions of dollars,' etc. was 'too much' I did not mean to suggest reform of the FDA to make drug approvals easier. I was suggesting that for these reasons the industry sector as a whole is unattractive. In fact, strictly from a public policy standpoint if any reforms of the FDA are needed they fall into three areas: (1) Congress should stop underfunding the FDA -- it's too important; (2) middle and lower level employees should be given added legal protections against retaliation by their more politically minded supervisors; and (3) additional measures should be taken to insulate the drug approval process from log-rolling and influence peddling by industry lobbyists. Not that I'm down on every company in the industry as an investment. I'm not. Just that I have come to disagree with the conventional wisdom that the way to invest in biotechs is to pick a bushel basket of good story stocks and hope some of them come in. I strongly disagree. In this industry more acutely than others, one should pick an individual company or maybe two for very certain, solid, hard-edged reasons and avoid the rest of the sirens. The most sensible way to do this, as it seems to me, is wait until FDA approval of an important drug is assured or nearly so. In the biotech industry, if you think a rising tide is going to lift a lot of boats, think again. More often than not the tide will be a tsunami.