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Biotech / Medical : Zonagen (zona) - good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Goss who wrote (3177)	3/30/1998 9:38:00 AM
From: Dauntless	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7041

Peter, credentials please? you wrote: <<<Another point, everyone keeps hanging their bull horns on the SGP relationship. Any day you could hear the news that SGP has decided to terminate its relationship because it does not see a clear way to any serious profits. The $10 million is cab fare for SGP and the milestone payments only come obviously when the milestones are reached.>>> You, and others, have repeatedly resorted to the claim that the SGP commitment is meaningless, a drop in the bucket or, in your case, "cab fare". Your SI profile doesn't indicate what you do for a living, but the history of your posts indicates that Zonagen is perhaps your only biotech, or even medical industry interest. It also indicates that you seem to lean to the short side of investing. FWIW, I've been working in the medical device industry for 22 years - mostly in medical devices with brief assignments in other areas (including pharmaceutical). I've been involved in sales, marketing, product & business development, and now general management. In my experience, there is NOTHING more invasive & thorough than the process of due diligence that was done in a situation similar to that which Zonagen went through. It's worse than an audit. While the amount of money is small relative to SGP's total revenues or R&D budget, these people DO NOT throw money around loosely. This type of decision is subject to incredible scrutiny & must be approved up & down the corporate ladder. SGP won't go broke over this amount of money but reputations are certainly at risk here - & heads will roll if they abandon this investment. This is especially true in this situation as SGP's decision was taken after the phase III clinicals were completed. Every example that I've seen offered here as proof that "these types of arrangements are often discontinued" involve a compound in the early development phase or early clinical trials. Based on my experience in this industry and with this situation in particular I simply find it hard to believe that SGP did not have a complete understanding of phentolamine as a therapy for ED. They have had the opportunity to study hard data from the most extensive clinical trials of phentolamine ever conducted. No one, outside of Zona & SGP has seen the complete dataset - so any other opinions, at this time, are based on imperfect information. I simply choose to believe that SGP's decision is more telling than the opinion of posters on this thread. No offense to the individual MD's & self proclaimed industry experts (supporters or otherwise) they haven't seen all the data. The rest of the naysayers, yourself, Mrs. Asensio, Steve "THEY DID NOT" Salgo, etc. are simply short investors with no relevant industry experience heaping fuel on the fire in an effort to influence someone. I could be wrong, but I'm going with those that have the most information. The verdict won't be in for quite some time - so why don't we try & stick to the facts, be civil (sticking to the facts will assist here) & wait for pertinent info to come available.