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Biotech / Medical : Neurobiological Tech (NTII) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Crawford who wrote (341)	5/17/1998 3:50:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1494

Highlight for me was that Freiman twice referred to memantine as a potential cash cow, and if I understood correctly if everything works out (the big if I guess) NTI gets a majority of the revenue in the US and Merz gets a majority in of the take in Germany--the actual numbers are a secret, Merz being very private etc, so worst case, NTI only gets 51% in the US and next to nothing in Germany. Well I guess worst case is that Memantine never gets to PhaseIII. But my limited understanding of the whole thing is that NTII seems to trade at an awfully small market cap for phaseIIb... Okay, back to the call, he was generally very conservative--they would like about 6M to do the things they want to do and to get it they need a deal--or to be more precise, he said they had a checklist for getting another 6M, which would be about what they need at the current burn to get them thru everything they want to do into 1999. 1. Do a deal with a large Pharm co, and there are ten big names on his list 2. with orphan status for X they can probably get another 100k to 1M for grants 3. 5M from a private placement 4. Reapply for Nasdaq (How about number one, drop number 3, thanks.) I don't know how the last one gets you any money but I'm not an accountant and am very lazy about reading the financials, stock price isn't the same as cash in hand to do trials and pay salaries --probably by that time in the call he had become sidetracked about what his checklist was supposed to be about (how to come up with 6M) and he had just sort of fallen apart into a list of priorities, and getting NTII' share price up and the company back on the Nasdaq was NOT a very high priority. If this company had nothing to work with, maybe the priorities would be reversed, so that's a good thing for investors I think, maybe bad for short term traders who were counting on more of a follow thru after the Merz news. Anyway, I am just trying to relay the mood of the call, to be honest the science of biotech pretty much goes over my head, I just hope that I can find things that are cheap for how far things are along in the pipeline... Oh, something important about the deal with Merz--Mr. Freiman did make it pretty clear that the deal was done because it is the best way to get all the pieces together for the FDA, Merz had a lot NTI needed and NTI had clinical data that Merz needed (or the other way around). One thing that stuck in my head was that they still don't have enough people enrolled in phaseII trials for Xercept, actually his exact words were "so far so good" but I'm pretty sure that he said they only had less than one quarter of the neccessary enrollment of 30/30/30. That post probably wasn't too useful, but like I said I only have a very limited understanding of the science and pretty much invest by the seat of my pants. I think I know the risk reward situation tho. Good luck to all, back to lurker mode for me. Warning: it is possible that I did not take clean enough notes and got confused on something, if I had to give you all a lousy "bottom line" summary it would be 1. don't count on Xerecept 2. doing a deal with a large Pharma is likely in the next six months 3. cash and burn rate were much more of a concern than getting the price of the stock up in order to get off the pink sheets.