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

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (3699)	5/8/2001 1:51:12 PM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52153

Harold, These trial results came as quite a surprise to me. (Although the movement in BGEN stock ahead of the release indicates that the results were not a surprise to everyone, although maybe people were just reacting to the early announcement by SRA). If Avonex were to stay stable (or continue its recent growth) then BGEN looked quite cheap to me. Amevive looks to me to be potentially one of the biggest new biotech drugs in quite a while. SRA has of course likely "cherry picked" their results, and a fuller analysis needs to wait for the presentation of the whole study. However (as Jim pointed out to me) the impact of this study will be immediate in Europe where the SRA drug is already on the market. It's hard to know how the FDA will react here. They certainly don't want to undermine the orphan drug program, and arguably allowing the same molecule with a different dosage form to compete does just that. On the other hand, this is apparently a clear clinical difference, and they are unlikely to want to deprive MS sufferers of this drug for another three years. Remember that on a Price/sales or P/E metric BGEN was already quite a bit cheaper than the other first tier stocks (about half that of AMGN). So some anticipated drop off in Avonex revenues was already in the stock. Peter