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Biotech / Medical : AVANT Immunotherapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: AVAN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SemiBull who wrote (389)	2/22/2002 1:06:54 AM
From: SemiBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 513

Love in the Time of Cholera By Matthew Goldstein Avant Immunotherapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:AVAN - news) Share price as of Wednesday's close: $1.06 Share price now: $1.51 Change: 42.45% Volume: 9.53 million shares, daily average 500,000 shares Last time this high: Feb. 19, 2002 52-week high: $6.93 52-week low: $0.91 Forward P/E before announcement: N/A Forward P/E after announcement: N/A STRUGGLING BIOTECH Avant Immunotherapeutics (NASDAQ:AVAN - news) may be having a hard time developing a winning drug, but it seems to have developed a partial antidote for bad news — issuing an upbeat press release. On Wednesday, shares of Avant plummeted 65% to $1.06 — on volume 26 times the daily norm — after the tiny Needham, Mass.-based company announced that its experimental heart drug had failed a clinical trial. In light of the bad news, Needham & Co., one of three brokerages that follows Avant, said it's reviewing an earlier Buy rating on the stock pending more information from the company. But Thursday was a different story. Shares rose 42% to $1.51 as the company announced that it had reached an agreement with the International Vaccine Institute to begin clinical trials in Bangladesh of a cholera vaccine Avant developed. Trading in the stock remained active, with a greater-than-normal 9.53 million shares changing hands. The timing of the cholera announcement — coming so soon after the news about the failed clinical test — struck us as a bit odd, especially since Avant doesn't exactly issue a press release a day. (So far this year, it's issued just six.) The announcement also came just days before Avant is expected to report an 11 cent loss for the fourth quarter, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Financial/First Call. Avant, like most small biotech companies, has a long history of quarterly losses. But Una Ryan, Avant's president and chief executive, says there was nothing fishy about the timing. ``I would love to say that for every bad release we have something waiting in the wings,'' says Ryan. ``But you can't plan it.'' She says the negotiations with the International Vaccine Institute had been going on for several months, and that she actually expected the news to break before the announcement about the heart-drug trouble. Ryan also theorizes that the big gain in Avant's stock price Thursday had less to do with the cholera news than with investors seeing an opportunity to get back into the stock. That may be true, but investors also should be mindful that Avant seems to have attracted its fair share of speculators and short-term traders in recent months. Last October, when the nation was still gripped with fear of imminent terrorist attacks, Avant shares briefly flirted with the $7 mark on news that it was working on an experimental anthrax vaccine. Quote: ``The market always overreacts,'' says Ryan of Wednesday's plunge. ``We were terribly disappointed. But the company is not going to go out of business.''