utenzi

I was reading the March '09 issue of Popular Mechanics while on the bus to work this morning and one of the shorts at the front of the magazine grabbed my interest. But it had nothing to do with apples. Apparently there's a company in Florida, ONI BioPharma, which has engineered a strain of bacteria that it has named SMaRT. So what, you ask? Well, tooth decay, as you probably know, is caused by bacteria in the mouth gobbling up sugar and excreting lactic acid. That's called lactic acid fermentation , in case you were curious. The acid causes a change in pH which allows calcium to dissolve. Pretty much the same idea as acid rain causing marble statues to erode in Italy---marble being composed primarily of calcium carbonate. So what this new SMaRT bacteria does is out compete the normal bacteria in the mouth. You see, SMaRT bacteria are engineered to not be able to excrete lactic acid. Instead they poop out an antibiotic that targets the bacteria that cause tooth decay. Pret...

The July 25th issue of The Independent , often just referred to as "the Indy", has a story on biological research. It's titled in their inimitable way as "Biotech or Biohazard?" . The story is about the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, a new 520,000-square-foot federal laboratory designed to research and combat the world's deadliest germs and potential biological weapons. One of the short list of locations for the lab is in nearby Butner NC, around 30 miles from the RTP area. The reason I mention this is that in a sidebar article about local Biosafety Level 3 facilities, the building I work in gets mentioned! Eeek. There'll be crowds of protestors descending down upon us. Wonderful! By the way, if this sorta thing gets you worried--this list is so incomplete... there's dozens not listed on here. Fortunately I just have to deal with level one and two biohazards. DURHAM Duke University * Cancer Center Isolation Facility, Research Drive—Stu...

Here's another chapter in the story of volatile biotech stocks. I bought Avanir (AVNR) at the end of February when bad news pushed the stock down drastically. I paid $1.52 a share and since then it's been even lower--as low as $1.07, in fact. But as you can see to the left, Avanir has become more friendly to investors as a result of the positive results of their drug Zenvia. Here's an excerpt from an article in BusinessWeek : Drug developer Avanir Pharmaceuticals said Wednesday that a clinical trial showed its drug Zenvia significantly lessened nerve pain in diabetic patients. Avanir shares surged $1.08, or 85 percent, to $2.35 in electronic premarket activity, after closing at $1.27 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Shares traded as high as $18.14 in February 2006 but have fallen sharply since, dropping to a low of $1.07 last month. In a late-stage clinical trial, patients with diabetic neuropathic pain were given Zenvia or placebo and asked to make daily journals entrie...

Case in point: Adolor Corporation (ADLR). This is a development-stage biopharmaceutical company that is engaged in the discovery and development of prescription pain management products. Adolor has a number of product candidates in various stages of development, ranging from preclinical studies to pivotal clinical trials. Their main drug candidate, Entereg (alvimopan), selectively blocks the unwanted effects of opioid analgesics on the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. That sounds pretty good and that explains why the stock was valued at $25 last Summer. Since there's 46 million shares, at one time this company was valued at over a billion dollars. Too bad that's just a fond memory now. After 3 price corrections--as can be seen in the graph to the left--the stock is now trading around $3.70 a share which puts Adolor's valuation around $170 million. Ouch! I bought some shares today just in case Adolor recovers some of it's old pizazz--but this stock might just be a goner. T...

The following post was derived from the University of Rochester (NY) website for press releases . You might ask why I think it might be of interest to you--and if you do, my answer is that ethanol is the wave of the future. Not because it's a good idea, but because the government in all its glory and wisdom is backing this energy play. Already ethanol production is having strong effects on the price of corn and it's only going to get worse--the research detailed here might change all that by allowing ethanol production to be shifted to waste biomass like sugar cane pulp and grass. Researchers at the University of Rochester have identified how genes responsible for biomass breakdown are turned on in a microorganism that produces valuable ethanol from materials like grass and cornstalks. This is very important since most ethanol is now produced from corn which isn't very efficient and also drives up the price of corn--and any animal or food "made" from corn. On th...

Yesterday I did some bargain shopping. First I went to Kohl's online store and picked up a hooded sweatshirt, crew neck sweatshirt, a t-shirt, and a fleece pullover and it all totaled up to $22.50 --before tax and shipping, anyway. I love bargains! Most of the stuff was 80% off. Speaking of bargains, Wall Street had a big sell-off yesterday. The stuff I had was all small companies that weren't affected much. I dropped around $150 in value. I couldn't constrain myself from buying more tho--and now my cash balance is practically nil. But at least I didn't stretch out and use margin. I've done that in the past and got burnt bad. Charred limb type burns. I can't say that I've learned my lesson since I was out on margin just a few weeks ago but at least I'm a little more cautious now. Anyway, the lovely stocks I picked up are PCYC and THLD. The first company, Pharmacyclics, is a pharmaceutical company that is developing drugs to treat cancer. Their drugs are...

I've been watching Onyx Pharmaceuticals for 6 months now, ever since I bought a few shares of their stock. I posted about it at that time. As you can see from that link, the stock was sharply down on some bad news and I bought my shares at the corrected price. That was due to my feeling that the stock had been unjustly punished by the market for news that didn't really hurt their core business very sharply. Today the stock is soaring on good news. To wit, a report that stated that their Nexavar cancer medicine, which they share with Bayer, helped patients with liver tumors live longer. While it is certainly good news for the company, I don't think it's good enough to warrent the stock moving up 80%--yet that's what has happened. Biotech stocks really do move irrationally. It's like watching the mood swings of a 13 year old girl. And oddly enough that's half the fun of investing in biotech stocks. Go figure. (and in case you're curious--I did sell it, I ...

Nexavar is a drug taken orally that targets both the tumor cell and the tumor vasculature. Nexavar targets members of two classes of kinases known to be involved in both cell proliferation and angiogenesis, the processes that enable cancer growth. These kinases include RAF kinase, VEGFR-1, 2, and 3, PDGFR-beta, KIT, and FLT-3. Several of those genes are ones that I find pop up when I run microarrays on my tumor samples so the action of this drug interests me. However my work is on breast cancer and Nexavar is used to combat advanced kidney cancer. But that's all beside the point--the reason for this post is that I bought a thousand shares of Onyx today. As you can see in the chart to the left, there was a huge drop in price between last Friday and today. You see, Onyx had some bad news last week. After the close of the stock market in NY it was revealed that the Phase 3 clinical trial of Nexavar in patients with advanced melanoma did not meet its primary endpoint. As a result the p...