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

To: Jongmans who wrote (18769)	4/8/1998 5:44:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

Tamoxifen data lifts Lilly, zaps Zeneca By Kevin Drawbaugh CHICAGO, April 7 (Reuters) - Strong data on the breast cancer-fighting value of a drug called tamoxifen on Tuesday surprisingly undercut the stock of the company that makes it and instead boosted the stock of a company that does not. In a seemingly paradoxical market response, shares in Zeneca Group Plc <ZEN.N> fell $6.25 to $141.25, while Eli Lilly & Co. <LLY.N> rose $3.25 to $64.375, both on the New York Stock Exchange in heavy trading. Analysts said the market response actually reflected somewhat rational expectations that were not surprising. The stock of Zeneca, the British drug maker, ran up sharply on Monday on news that a clinical trial with tamoxifen was halted early because it was so effective that researchers no longer wanted to withhold it from control group patients taking dummy pills. The National Cancer Institute study of 13,388 women at high risk of breast cancer showed the drug cut incidence of the disease by 45 percent in women taking the 35-year-old drug. Researchers said the results were the first to show that breast cancer can not only be treated, but prevented. However, investors took profits in Zeneca's stock on Tuesday as analysts pointed out that tamoxifen has already lost patent protection in Europe and will lose it in the United States in 2002, severely limiting the drug's potential as a big money-maker. "The financial benefit to Zeneca is limited," said Hambrecht & Quist drug industry analyst Alex Zisson. Zeneca took in 1997 worldwide revenues of $508 million from the drug, about half of which came from the United States, where it is sold under the brand name Nolvadex. "The clinical study was interesting, but I'm not sure it will stimulate an explosion of usage of the drug for prevention of breast cancer," Zisson said. Lilly's stock rose because the company makes the recently launched osteoporosis drug Evista, known generically as raloxifene, which is chemically similar to tamoxifen. Both are selective estrogen receptor modulators -- drugs that change the actions of estrogen in the female body. Analysts said the tamoxifen data supplied Lilly investors with a rationale that is tenuous, at best, for piling into a stock that has under-performed its pharmaceutical industry peers so far in 1998. "We have a stock that's really lagged the group and people have been waiting to get in," said Jeffrey Chaffkin, drug industry analyst at PaineWebber. "I'm not sure the tamoxifen data is a good reason to buy the stock. But people were looking for an excuse," he said. Analysts cautioned that data showing tamoxifen to be effective at preventing breast cancer may not apply to Evista, but added that Evista is seen as promising in combatting that disease and has many years of patent protection ahead of it. A Lilly spokesman said on Monday that the Indianapolis-based company expects data to be presented in mid-May at an American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting on Evista and breast cancer. Lilly's stock had been hurt recently by new prescription data for Evista, which has not hit the market as strongly as expected since its launch late last year, analysts said. 16:54 04-07-98