Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc fka ARIA

[zuize]

Thanks for the link to the great article.
Adam Feuerstein, what a crook!

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In her letter, Sloan called particular attention to Adam Feuerstein, a biotech reporter whose relentlessly negative blog posts for thestreet.com this year have not only been filled with exaggeration, mischaracterization and half-truths, but curiously have also coincided with the spikes in short trading.

On March 11, for example, the day that German regulators announced their approval and Northwest Bio’s stock broke through $10, Feuerstein was quick to weigh in with a story that the company had withheld the news for two weeks to use it to divert attention from the fact that it had failed to deliver an interim report on the results of its Phase III trial back in the United States. As the chairman of the independent committee overseeing the trial later pointed out, there was no interim study and, by protocol, the company would have been prevented from seeing it even if there were one. As for that delay in getting out the good news, the company’s perfectly reasonable explanation was that it needed time to have the German notification translated into English and checked by the Germans.

The next month, on April 3, the headline on Feuerstein’s post was that Northwest Bio acknowledged that the FDA might throw out results of its Phase III study. It sounds pretty ominous. But all that really happened was that the company, in its annual report filed with the SEC, included that possibility in the long list of risks that investors should take into consideration, just as any company in the midst of a Phase III trial would have to do.

Or consider Feuerstein’s posts in May and June concerning a presentation by Northwest Bio’s chief executive, Linda Powers, at the big annual cancer research conference, in which she described how one patient had responded to the company’s therapy.

In both columns, Feuerstein expressed outrage that a drug company would exploit the suffering of patients for commercial gain (imagine that!) by selectively releasing results from a Phase I/II trial. He quoted Dr. Aman Buzdar, the head of clinical research at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the lead hospital for the Northwest Bios trial, criticizing the company for taking the “unusual and inappropriate” step of releasing such information. If Buzdar had first checked with his colleagues, however, he would have found that two of them had recently appeared in a National Geographic documentary focused on just such interim results from a pancreatic cancer patient. And, as CREW noted in its letter to the SEC, Buzdar himself made positive comments at a 1999 conference about a breast cancer drug he was testing that was still in clinical trials.

Then last week Feuerstein declared that the approval by London was really a “non-news event” because only one other company had applied for a similar approval since the program was launched in April. It was all just a smokescreen, he explained, to divert attention from the unfavorable terms on which Northwest Bio had recently raised another $27 million from investors in a hostile funding environment — a hostile funding environment, we should note, that Feuerstein himself had helped to create.

Feuerstein declined to speak to me last week, but his editor said she was sticking by her “dynamic” reporter. When I asked whether Feuerstein had been in contact with the shorts, she would only say that he was in touch with a wide range of investors. Using thestreet.com’s journalistic standards, the headline on that might be: “Biotech reporter concedes he may be exchanging information with shorts.”

I have no idea whether Northwest Bio’s immunizations work or whether it will become the billion dollar company that Powers says it could be. What I do know is that given the choice between allowing innovative companies to develop promising products that could save thousands of lives, or allowing Wall Street wise guys to use sleazy tactics to manipulate share prices for short-term profit, I’m siding with the companies. Maybe it’s time for the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to be siding with them as well.