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

To: ahhaha who wrote (275)	8/2/1998 1:57:00 AM
From: John Metcalf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 399

Thanks for the post, Ahhaha. You've been right about the market action, so I've tried to follow your reasoning about the company. For me, it just doesn't work. It's hard to bet against ARQL. They'll get conventional royalties on any compound developed with the big pharmas, and a 50-50 deal on any compound in the biotech collabs. They have collaborative arrangements with thirty companies. Since these are for synthetic molecules, there will be composition of matter patents, with their partners. With the development arrays biased towards favored characteristics, their compounds should work better than iterative parallel synthesis libraries. And they have a lead optimization process. Simply put, I can't accept that all these possibilities will yield nothing, that so many are paying for nothing at all. No other chemistry company has so many programs with so many partners. To me, this is a hint for validation. In the near-term, investors are put off by the expansion, the new facility, Eric Gordon's departure, and rumblings about drug discovery. All of this smells like burning cash, and it is. They have a Director of Biology, and their most recent public materials have alluded to expanded capability, suggesting an everything-development company, like Millennium. On a long-term basis, ArQule still looks great to me. In the intermediate term, ten compounds are in pre-clinical development. When (if) these enter the clinic, we'll find out what they are, who has done the research work, and what targets they affect. Some characterization of ArQule's molecules will be salutory to the stock price. In the short-term, congratulations on your calls!