Well, congratulations!
If I didn't say it before, TA has its limitations, and in stocks with very low volumes, the limitations are significantly greater---- MCET generally trades only about $30,000 worth of stock during a day, so can be easily pushed around either way. TA also cannot predict major news that the market must discount. That was the case with MCET, which announced major news Friday, and rallied powerfully on 18 times normal volume.
I had no idea what that company does, but I did some checking. I happen to know a thing or two about TLRs... I know of other companies pursuing similar TLR-related therapies for various things, but I was not aware of MCET. I hope they publish their results; if they do not, I would be very skeptical. There is no reason to NOT publish the results, if they are credible and real. They have some intellectual property, presumably covering this work, and there are no "secrets" regarding how the pathways work. Zillions of people are working on this, and new things are being discovered and published daily. At my institution, we are involved in similar things, have intellectual property protection, and fully realize the commercial potential, but none of these are roadblocks to publication. In fact, you WANT to publish the results for many reasons.
There are some puzzling things in the press release. It sounds like they are inhibiting TLR signaling by RNA interference using dsRNA, which presumably is of a length that will facilitate production of siRNA via the usual pathways, which in turn will inhibit whatever transcripts it can hybridize with. But dsRNA is also a ligand for certain TLRs, so maybe they are using the dsRNA as an adjuvant to "prime" the usual antiviral response?? If so, that is an old method that is often used and can be effective in facilitating vaccines and such, but is not really much of a breakthrough at all.
Furthermore, other studies have shown that interfering with TLR signaling leads to inability to clear pathogens, a chronic, ineffective inflammation, and greater mortality and morbidity. So the press release is rather confusing and lacking in many details. Also, bear in mind that even short siRNA oligos are not without side effects; off-target effects are frequent, and the oligos themselves can be detected by certain TLRs and precipitate their own immune response that can lead to genomic shutdown and cell death. In the case of the flu viruses, this would probably not be a major problem, and could even be an asset, but that needs to be established clinically.
And often, encouraging mouse studies produce paradoxical, even opposite results in clinical trials for reasons that are not entirely clear at all. Cancer drugs are notorious in that regard; you can implant human tumors into mice, develop drugs that quickly and completely eradicate those tumors in mice, and yet the drugs may be ineffective or may even worsen the cancer when used on patients. There's lots that isn't known, and the issues are not at all simple. On the plus side, these are some of the top priorities at the NCI, and there are a lot of very brilliant people working very rapidly on these things.
But that said, there is certainly real therapeutic potential in the TLR signaling pathway in many diseases. Infection is really just the tip of the iceberg. Exactly how TLRs participate in diseases is an area of intense interest and still fairly early on (TLR signaling was only discovered about 7 years ago, and nobody had much idea of what they were doing in other diseases until just the last 2 or 3 years). But the road from bench to bedside is a very long one, and you can count on things going wrong and unexpected results and developments, some good perhaps, many not good at all.
So, a considerable grain of salt is indicated here IMHO. Since it's a low-volume pink, it doesn't take much more than a rumor of an impending positive development to attract volume, and so get the stock price moving in a hurry. So if it were me, I'd regard MCET as a trade, with a chance to become an investment. The odds there are less than 1% that a product will ever be FDA approved, that's just the nature of the biotech industry and the history of product development. And the time line to bring anything to market is very long, and that needs to be kept in mind also. The general timeline for taking preclinical mouse data into clinicals and NDA status would be of the order of 5 years or longer in most cases. Clinical trials in avian flu would be no simple matter because the prevalence is still so low. This was a problem in many of the HIV trials, some of which are still going on because of that, and HIV is far more prevalent than avian flu.
As a rule, I don't put much into story stocks anymore. I have just had too much experience watching the best stories go up in smoke, or get ignored by Wall Street, so the story never is manifested in greater stock price. And on the other hand, lots of stocks have no story, but may produce big returns. So there is a poor correlation between how good the story is, and how much money one might make on the stock in some reasonable time frame.
But there is one story stock I would buy without hesitation if it listed in New York, and I would buy a lot of it too. I am waiting now for that to happen. They are in the antivirus field also, and believe me, they are years ahead of MCET and all the rest. That company is called Benitec. What they are doing is no secret, and not shrouded in mystery in puzzling press releases, but published in excellent peer-reviewed journals by top-notch scientists (not in-house journeymen with an obvious conflict of interest and no external review of their work at all). That's the way the real biotechs work. Check it out.
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