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Biotech / Medical : ArQule -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (208)	5/11/1998
From: William Nelson	Respond to of 399

I think the bottom line here is we're not going anywhere until there are drugs in clinical trials. No amount of further biotech collaborations makes any difference because it's too obvious that the collaborations could very exploratory. A sign-on from Merck or another big pharma would help too of course. But I don't see how the small investor can play this since we have no possible source of info whether it will occur.

To: ahhaha who wrote (208)	5/11/1998 12:46:00 AM
From: Larry Liebman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 399

It's an interesting notion that the price of the stock reflects the inherent value. Ergo: decreases in stock price are both "rational" and a function of an efficient market. I am intrigued by this assumption. For example, I bought INCY at $26 and watched it "erode" to $18. I bought MEDI at $19 and watched it slowly dissolve to $13. I held the INCY, sold the MEDI when it declined. As it were, both made 400% gains within a 2 year time-frame. Perhaps, more to the point, I bought a small position in ENMD at $9. My speculative choice jumped to $12, and promptly plummeted to $6. Based on its decline I should have sold. I did sell 1/3 at $12, the rest at $66 last week. Suffice it to say I have also had biotechs like CNSI and AMLN which resulted in substantial losses. I am interested in how you discriminate between the INCY's and CNSI's. I applaud your call on ARQL. I am also interested in what might change your opinion. I am still interested in which biotechs have the technology which you conclude to be valid and efficacious. Where are you looking to invest your 70% when the market corrects?

To: ahhaha who wrote (208)	5/11/1998 12:38:00 PM
From: Dr. Voodoo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 399

The price isn't sliding, it's eroding which is the worst of all Chinese Water Torture worlds. Could you please define precisely the difference between sliding and eroding? I'm having a little trouble with this one. There are more and more collaborations but they aren't significant. True. I can tell you after having talked with too many CFOs that comments like a., b., c.,d., are just the wrong things for me to hear. Especially d. If the allies are satisfied with ARQL's results, why aren't the money managers? What feedback are they getting from the allies? Rome wasn't built in a day unless you had all your money in ENMD. The answer is that when a molecule is engineered to work in extremely specific ways the plethora of near misses and the cost to evaluate them goes up exponentially with the number of candidates. The allies have to bear that cost. Declining returns to scale so eventually you have to reduce the scale. If you think for one moment that the allies aren't spending just as much money in-house to do the same type of work, think again. All of the major pharmaceutical companies have research labs cranking out compounds, many have combinatorial groups. Whether they do it one at a time or in parallel or whatever, according to you it's all a near miss? Why? Address human health problems. A human is an organism, not a mechanism, not a mechanism of quadrillions of micro systems. Are you saying that, mechanistically, rational drug design is failure? Occasionally the ARQL's will find the needle in the haystack. Isn' t that what research and drug discovery is about? Finding the needle in the Haystack? If you're trying to say that ARQL's model sucks that's one thing, but I seem to infer a broader meaning here. I perceive that you don't like biotechs in general. Am I right? There is the more probable tops down approach of addressing the diseased organism. Can we help the organism to help itself? We try to find ways to enhance the immune system's ability to do the job it evolved to do sine qua non. We try to support genetic structures which have a weakness in configuration to the billions of other microorganisms trying to use their evolved advantage. We try to resolve imperfections in the almost-perfect immune system's machinery which causes it to be misdirected to attack other parts of the human organism. You are presuming that these approaches work. How do you propose to make cancerous cells immunogenic in all people without having to remove them from the specific individual? or AID's patients develop an immune system? Are you suggesting gene therapy? The fund I run is 70% in cash so I'm not much interested in any Pies-in-the-Sky currently. By any chance is this a short fund? Or are you just predicting a big market correction?