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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: james who wrote (10142)	10/25/1997 10:16:00 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

As I recall, biotech went into a slide from around September, 1996 until November 7, then began a nice run. Hard to isolate a cause, but institutional selling for tax considerations seems logical (your government at work again). IMO Ligand recently had a lot of very-short-term $$ in for the last 6-7 weeks in anticipation of a pop on the deal. They started getting out on the day of the announcement (price actually dropped until late in that session) and are still saddling up. Some are institutional investors (Henry's Big Boys) and run like an elephant through a village. I think we've seen most of this phenomenon-but it should still pop up from time to time over the next 2 weeks. If the market remains bad, you could actually see LGND prices lower than now-but IMO the latest would be in about 2 weeks. Bottom line: I'm holding every warrant I'm overweight in, with very little margin danger, and GLAD AS HELL I don't have to try to time a bottom over the next 2 weeks. Andy: better keep Henry's "20 by 12-31" bottle handy-you're gonna need it! BTW I don't doubt it takes a Big Pharma 6-10 years to get a diabetes drug through Phase III. It takes those folks 6-10 hours to find the restroom.(:>) Seriously, they ought to get out of R & D and just buy it from the development firms. You do what you're good at in any business, and Big Pharma's future is in production, marketing, and making investors in companies like Ligand very rich.

To: james who wrote (10142)	10/25/1997 10:34:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

james, I'm not sure where to start with your comments. LGND has a very strong patent position on most of their drugs (over 150 issued and 200 pending). Publishing a patented structure actually makes it more difficult for others to protect, because the publication puts the structure in the public domain. Targretin has been in clinical trails for 3 years now. The Nature article came out 8 months after pivotal Phase III Targretin trials (for CTCL) were announced. These trials are scheduled for completion next year. Targretin will probably be on pharmacy shelves in 1999 and LGND's phase II European trial for type II diabetes is finishing up. I assume that you are way behind the curve on LGND. In fact the relationship between RXRs and PPARs (heterodimer formation) was published by Ligand scientists in 1992, before LGND even went public. LGND discovered RXRs and in 1992 their natural ligand, 9-cis retinoid acid, the first polypeptide hormone to be discovered in over 25 years, was described. The Nature article is old news to most. If fact the announcement of the diabetes indication was made Sept 12, 1996, the same day that this thread began, not in the March, 1997 Nature paper. Check out the past 10,000 post. I think you have missed a few critical details.