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Biotech / Medical : NKTR Drug delivery Company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (49)	7/5/2006 1:40:47 PM
From: tuck	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 507

Hard to say what Novo is doing here. They stopped the PIII with 5 months to go because of post-prandial glucose levels being out of whack. And that was over two years ago: Message 20078832 For a while nothing happened. Then Novo bought out most of the program for cheap. Still nothing happened -- i.e. no further clinical action -- and now this announcement implying that Novo still has some interest in proceeding. But to call their progress glacial would be an understatement. Initially, I thought they were just trying to kill the program as quietly as they could, in true pharma fashion. Now I don't know what to think. Competitors such ALKS and MNKD aren't moving super fast, but they're definitely making up a lot of ground on plodding Novo. And of course, NKTR/PFE are about to hit the market, though that program also took a lot longer than hoped. Novo's going to have to move quickly now, or be fourth or fifth to market. It once dreamed of being first. I need to look more closely at Lilly/ALKS and MNKD to see when their products are now expected to hit the market, and what advantages they may offer. For one, the NKTR "bong" has been criticized for being unsightly and unwieldy. GNBT has a similar program (buccal delivery, that is, through membranes inside the mouth) that got handed back to it by Lilly, which now seems to be firmly wedded only to ALKS in this space. And BioSante mentioned something about having an inhaled insulin program a few years back. There are even a couple of other programs (KOSP?) that I can't recall. Some may have quietly killed the programs, dunno. Since you're here mostly for an intermediate term trade, it may not matter to you, but I'm possibly in for the long haul (though not in big at the moment), so I should really get back up to speed on the competition. Anyway, if you feel up to it, there's a few names for you to check out. Edit: As an example, here's BioSante, whose program was announced in '03: bioportfolio.com Sounds great, huh? Huge advantage in bioavailability over Euxbera. What they don't seem to be mentioning is that the program is almost 3 years old, and is still not in humans. Cheers, Tuck