MDVN – ASCO GU Update

Last night, the abstracts for clinical trials presenting at the 2012 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium. For now, we want to focus on the most important abstract: Medivation’s (NASDAQ: MDVN) MDV3100 Phase III AFFIRM study of men with castration-resistant prostate cancer(CRPC) that were previously treated with docetaxel. After reviewing the abstract, we believe MDV3100 will replace […]

SNMX – Initiating Coverage on Senomyx

Introduction to Senomyx Senomyx $SNMX is unique from every one of the other companies we cover – while SNMX uses the same tools and techniques of biotech and pharmaceutical drug discovery, they apply these efforts to the discovery of novel food and beverage ingredients. Senomyx develops high throughput assays to screen large compound libraries for […]

CLSN – Quick Take- It’s Bear Territory

CLSN: Quick Take- It’s Bear Territory Overview: Celsion is developing a drug called Thermodox, a heat labile liposomal form of the chemotherapy doxorubicin. Investors are mainly interested in the HEAT trial, a multinational trial in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) comparing Thermodox with radiofrequency ablation (RFA) versus RFA alone. The Wrong Endpoint: It does not […]

ONTY – The Bull Case

The Bull Case Note: We at Chimera are not in complete agreement on ONTY. This is my view. Background: Oncothyreon developed Stimuvax, liposome vaccine (L-BLP25), as a cancer vaccine for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), breast cancer, and multiple myeloma. It licensed worldwide rights to Merck KGaA, who has now taking over […]

ARQL – Quick Update on Arqule

On January 17th, ArQule Inc (NASDAQ: ARQL) announced that their Phase 2 trial of ARQ197(Tivantinib) met its primary endpoint in 2nd-line hepatocellular carcinoma(liver cancer). This was somewhat of a surprising results given the difficulty of treating 2nd-line HCC and previous failures in this disease. There are currently no approved drugs for this indication. The recent […]

DEPO – Quick Update – Paragraph IV – DM1992 Phase 2

Depomed released a statement that Actavis Group, a generic drug manufacturer filed a paragraph IV challenge against Gralise, Depomed’s once-daily gabapentin formulation. NEUTRAL on Paragraph IV We view this event as having no net impact. Patent challenges are not unexpected in this pharmaceutical environment, especially in the drug delivery space. The current generic drug legislation rewards early […]

Trade Ideas for some upcoming catalysts

We wanted to throw out some trading ideas for some stocks that we are following, but may not necessarily get full write-ups on in time. Ideally, we will have research pieces on some of the companies below in the near future. – On Thursday January 26th, Celgene(NASDAQ:CELG) will be reporting earnings and financial guidance for […]

MNTA – Update on Momenta

Over the past several weeks, Momenta Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq:MNTA) has had interesting developments on multiple fronts that we want to update subscribers on. Novartis (NYSE:NVS) reported 4Q’11 earnings of $225 million in generic Lovenox sales, which is very high given Sanofi launched an authorized-generic Lovenox briefly. These are very good sales numbers that put Momenta back […]

FOLD – Initiating Coverage

FOLD: Initiating Coverage Overview: Now here is an interesting story. Amicus Therapeutics was founded in 2002 by serial entrepreneur and CEO John Crowley. He had previously founded Novozyme seeking a treatment for his daughter and son, both diagnosed with Pompe disease. The effort led to the discovery of enzyme replacement therapy, Myozyme, now marketed by […]

AMLN – Neutral/Bearish Trade for PDUFA

Analyst Notes: These kind of things are troubling because of the cardiovascular nature of the FDA’s qualms. However, give it a 50% success probability “In the second CRL, Amylin and its partners were asked to conduct a thorough QT (tQT) study with Bydureon and submit data from the DURATION-5 study which was conducted to compare […]

CBST – 2011 Q4 Quarterly Report Follow-up; Catalysts Through 2012 and Beyond

CBST: 2011 Q4 Quarterly Report Follow-up; Catalysts Through 2012 and Beyond Thursday, January 19 Cubist announced fourth quarter and full-year 2011 results today that surpassed analyst expectations. Excluding one-time costs, quarterly earnings jumped to 66 cents/share from 24 cents the previous year. This was well above consensus estimates of 31 cents. Profit decreased to 11 […]

LXRX – Lexicon Pharmaceuticals is Overvalued

Lexicon Pharma stocks its drug candidate pipeline with a discovery platform based on mouse gene knockout technology, which has allowed them to study the roles of different proteins in disease and select drug targets accordingly. The company’s major clinical programs are headlined by their candidate for type 2 diabetes, LX4211. LXRX has consistently talked about […]

Preview of ASCO 2012 GU Symposium

The 2012 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium from February 2-4, 2012. The conference is broken down into 3 days focusing on three main areas: Thursday appears dedicated to prostate cancer, Friday is mostly related to urothelial cancers(penile, urethral, urothelial, and testicular), and Saturday is dedicated to kidney cancer. Abstracts will be released on Tuesday, January 31, […]

CBST – Initiating Coverage

CBST: Initiating Coverage Overview: Cubist is a small commercial stage biotech focused on the development of acute care products. Its revenues are almost entirely derived from the antibiotic Cubicin, used for skin and skin-structure infections. The drug has been one of the most successful recent antibiotic launches, allowing Cubist to focus on building up its […]