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

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (14412)	2/7/1998 7:36:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

Karun, The decision about LLY is due in a couple of weeks. I still think that the drug under consideration is SRGN's IL-2 conjugate to treat CTCL. When I initially say the filing acceptance, I thought that an approval rec had been given. Now I think that it was just an OK for the application to be reviewed. I suspect that approval is borderline and I'm not sure what happens if LGND picks the drug and it isn't approved. I suspect that long term they are better off just taking the additional money from LLY and getting a higher royalty rate on one of the Rexinoids (LGND gets to pick), but yesterday's move may push the decision toward near term income for an approved drug. The drug does work, but can have significant side effects, and it was hard to tell from the SRGN press release how serious these side effects would be.

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (14412)	2/7/1998 11:16:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

Karun, Next week's Barron's suggests that the GLX/SBH merger may not be made in heaven. Alan Abelson's column indicates: "News that Glaxo and SmithKline would like to tie the knot and create a tiny company with a market value of only $160 billion sent shares of both heavenward and set off a sympathetic explosion in the drug sector generally. It also set off a thunderclap of approval in Wall Street, duly accompanied by oohs and ahs in the press. We Wonder It strikes us that, in some ways, this is not a merger of two strong companies that together will prove an extraordinary dominating force in the global drug business. Right off the bat we were struck by the incongruity of the bullish claim that (a) there's scant overlap between the companies buy, yet, (b) a merger will yield vast savings. Glaxo, from what we gather, faces some formidable challenges. Not the least of these is in AIDS drugs, a field in which it has long been No. 1. Thus, for example, in December, for the first time, more prescriptions were written for Bristol-Myers 4dT for use in HIV therapy than for Glaxo's flagship AIDS drug, AZT. Nor should we stress, is this the only competitive cloud over Glaxo's AIDS offerings. New formulations continue to come down the pike in considerable numbers. Among them is DuPont Merck's extremely promising new drug, now in development; when it hits the market, a year or so from now, it may well cause considerable dislocations in the field, with Glaxo's entries possible prime candidates. In like vein, SmithKline's Augmentin antibiotic, one of its two prime products, is now faced with fresh and serious competition from a Pfizer drug. And in any case, Augmentin is slated to come off patent in around three years. On the face of it, not a marriage made in heaven."