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

To: Pseudo Biologist who wrote (16644)	3/6/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32384

PB, Thanks for the reference. I was beginning to think that I was now dreaming about Merger Mania (and Wild Bill Haseltine!). Now that you have confirmed the "milking" statement and response, I'll give my dog tail tale. Joe Kernan (and others) focused on the basic research synergy between SBH and the genomics deal with HGSI, and GLX's various recombinatorial chemistry deals. Joe Kernan suggested that the many leads were to big pharmas like a candy store was to little boys. I agreed that there was a wealth of potential information in the two technologies, but had trouble seeing that as the driving force for the merger. Most of the money spent on drug discovery and development is at the back end (clinical trials, development, and marketing) not at the front end (discovering the interesting compound). In fact, there are many ways of discovering the interesting compounds using more tradition means. Not surprisingly, I thought of LGND. The number of IRs and STATs already discovered are overwhelming. LGNDS has about 100 targets (IRs or STATs) and can already create thousands of potential drugs for each. Their screening is based on targetted drug discovery, and they already identify too many compounds for themselves and partners (over 20% of the pharmaceutical industry). The research action is really more focused on the proteins and the complexes they form, than identifying the sequence. Analogs of hormones are most effective created when structures with known biological activity are modified. Thus genomics and recombinatorial chemistry actually seem to be going backwards from where LGND already is. I think that SBH and GLX really know this. SBH has many ongoing programs in various interesting areas. They have seen that modulators of STATs can replace most of the major polypeptide products of Biotechnology. GLX has active PPAR programs. They know that they can make various TZDs that will impact a host of metabolic diseases. There are many advantages of mergers and of increasing R&D budgets. However, I think that it's hard to make a case that genomics and combinatorial chemistry will offer significant advantages over the very successful approaches used by LGND and their partners and competitors. Developing drugs directed against the 100 targets that LGND is focusing on provides a wealth of leads. Of course other receptors and analogs are known. I suspect that the sequences offer many variations on a theme, but not much of a hint that the variations of the new sequences are any more useful than the known targets.