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

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (3811)	5/16/2001 5:17:57 PM
From: Biomaven	Respond to of 52153

Of course, as I've said before, the pharma get to kill off and bury their losers in their high-fenced backyards in the middle of the night, while the biotechs have to do it at noon in the front yard with all the neighbors watching and the shorts salivating. One hidden advantage of mergers among biotechs is that the combined company gets to kill off the weak projects without people caring as much. There are a couple of different flavors of weak projects: 1. Dead and everyone knows it, but just not buried yet. I guess these don't do that much harm and save some embarrassment. 2. Dead and the company knows it but they just haven't told us yet. Usually this means they are trying to keep the company alive until another project gains traction. (Rick refers to these as "bait and switch.") Pretty common among old-style loser biotechs. There's a more subtle variant of this where the company carefully refrains from doing the critical experiment or trial that would kill the project. 3. Everyone except the company knows it's dead. <g> 4. Dead and apparently buried and then miraculously returned to life. Actually some of the best investment returns have come from this category. (Think SCIOS, DEPO, AMLN). Perhaps LJPC might even end up in this category. Peter