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

To: RXGOLF who wrote (28534)	3/16/1999 2:53:00 AM
From: Cheryl Galt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

>> I too wonder what the investors of Immunex thought throughout the years of 1994, 1995, 1996, as their money sat "dead". << Immunex, Seattle's favorite, had plenty of rocky times and FDA setbacks before its current success. Over the years, American Home Products became the majority stockholder. I think AHP today owns something like 90% of IMNX. For all practical purposes, Immunex IS American Home Products. This is true even though Immunex has only 39.9M shares outstanding, about the same as Ligand. (Many of the original IMNX people have spun off into innovative 3rd-tier biotechs, like Corixa.) --------------------- >> However, I would question how any kind of news could be leaking from the Targretin trials << Likewise. But what bothers me is that, EXCEPT for CTCL, Ligand has announced almost nothing in the way of interim results for all the Phase II and Phase II/III trials for Targretin against solid tumors, even though most of those trials have been ongoing since 1996 or early 1997. Unlike diabetes trials, trials against late-stage cancers can be relatively short. (I've read all the press releases back to Aug, 1996. I can list the interim results in a handful of sentences, and they are not specific regarding efficacy - but mostly mention dosage tolerances.) On the other hand, Ligand has thoroughly publicized the good PRE-CLINICAL results for Targretin against ABC for the animal model. Because of the long silence, I tend to guess that results against large human tumors have been disappointing. If statistically significantly many people with solid tumors were now alive -- or had their lives extended -- because of Panretin and Targretin, Ligand would have told us by now, imo. ------------------ It seems to me that Ligand is on a fishing expedition (and this is NOT perjorative; that is what biotech research IS), looking for a cancer that is sufficiently affected by panretin/targretin. Since Ligand's drugs have an affinity for the estrogen receptor, the best bets may be breast and ovarian cancer. Let's hope Ligand catches a big fish this year, for ABC.

To: RXGOLF who wrote (28534)	3/17/1999 12:31:00 AM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32384

Thanks for your response RXGOLF its good to hear that the possibility of bad news leaking out of clinical trials seems to be very low. One of the perils of small cap investing is the advantage insiders have compared to 'Joe Average' investors. I tend to be somewhat pessimistic with respect to future projections. Many estimates are done assuming that things go right but especially in the biotech world, this is barely the case. Because of the uncertainties, I like to invest in companies having either a large cash pile or even better a revenue stream from an approved product. Besides the risk of running out of money, LGND has quite a broad pipeline which makes the technology risk quite small. With respect to the breast cancer trials, I consider the current lack of news as negative. There may be reasons other that lack of efficiency or statistical significance but who knows? The smaller trials lets us suggest a response of 40%, which does not seem bad to me and if the breast cancer study shows similar results we could look at 20$ per share very soon. Studying Biotechs now for quite a while I tend to favor companies which tend to have a low development cost per product,even when those products show only a marginal improvement. One example are companies in the field of drug delivery. Also a focused technology platform can be a plus, when economies of scale are achieved, subsequently lowering the development cost too. An examples for this flavor is PDLI in Antibodies (even though not hugely succesful ). LGND has two or three different platforms and they are in my opinion not focused enough, considering the limited resources they have. Well, we got a very good discussion going on here...