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

To: tom pope who wrote (737)	12/13/2001 1:07:48 PM
From: hdl	Respond to of 1025

igen sold stock so it can pay the lawyers to handle roche's appeal.

To: tom pope who wrote (737)	12/13/2001 1:55:19 PM
From: RCMac	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1025

baffling stock. Reading the reports of the trial on the Yahoo board, it is absolutely clear that Roche's witnesses are at best irrelevant and at worst incompetent . . . Yet the stock basically languishes, down 10% in the past three weeks in the face of the the apparently disastrous showing by Roche. Tom, I've worried about that a bit, but am fairly satisified with these thoughts: (1) IGEN is a small, underfollowed company (only Gruntal and a regional research house, Chesapeake, follow it and send someone to the courtroom some of the time) with a market cap too small for many institutioal investors; (2) some investors are put off by allegations of nepotism, in that the CEO's son is the principal owner of a joint venture with IGEN that, some say pretty loudly, has unduly benefited from IGEN technology, etc.; (3) IGEN's principal asset is its ORIGEN biological detection technology, i.e., hard to understand without pretty specialized knowledge; (4) a significant part (some would say all) of IGEN's value is the potential verdict in early January, and for most investors and most analysts, the law -- in particular the considerations that go into trying to handicap the outcome of a jury trial -- is an even more impenetrable mystery than biotechnology. Most investors therefore go on to the next stock rather than spending time trying to understand the potential values in IGEN. Many of those who do have some relevant expertise, including experienced litigators and other lawyers, are fairly enthusiastic about the prospects for a large verdict. It's grown into my third largest position (after SEPR and NBIX) largely by rising from below 12 early this year -- at one point it was my largest but SEPR and NBIX have resurged and I lightened a bit on IGEN a couple of months ago when MLNM and BTRN seemed almost criminally cheap. reports of the trial and the Yahoo board For anyone who hasn't been following the IGEN Yahoo Board, here are some of the more recent posts about trial progress by Lawfighter, an experienced Baltimore commercial litigator with, I think, pretty measured judgment. The wheels do seem to be coming off Roche's defense: messages.yahoo.com messages.yahoo.com messages.yahoo.com messages.yahoo.com (three posts starting here) messages.yahoo.com (three posts starting here) The trial started on October 23, and opening statements are described in a series of posts by Lawfighter starting here: messages.yahoo.com Other lawyers posting on the Yahoo board include anxt, mvj737, texasperry, and me (RCMac98 on Yahoo). Two contributors, intelligent_rat and hightechmoney, seem to have a good grasp of the technology. The IGEN board is, amazingly for Yahoo, both pretty civil and substantive, almost completely free of the adolescent namecalling and worse that makes most Yahoo boards unbearable. --RCM