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Man, people need courses in logic and the logical corollaries of their thoughts.
Stock buybacks, especially for companies like MNTA, are public admissions that say "Folks, we're out of ideas. We don't know what to do with this money, so we're gonna give it back to you." That's fine for a dividend paying utility company that will do nothing but provide electricity to the neighbourhood, but it's not ok for a biotech that is supposed to develop generics and novel drugs.
If you think they should buy back stock, then logically that says you should sell your stock.
Some months ago I brought up the topic of shorting DNDN...
:(
no guts, no glory
CYTK:
Yeah, I'm still pretty negative on the cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle drugs.
I appreciate that they are addressing, at least verbally, the seeming "gap" between the root problem in diseases like MG versus what their drug tries to fix. But it seems to be that they're just giving it lip service. I don't think they can meaningfully demonstrate an improvement in quality of life for their drug; modifying disease progression is out of the question. So how do they get approval?
They do have a smooth muscle myosin inhibitor coming down the pipe. To be honest I think this one is the most interesting of all because I'm a big believer in reducing peripheral resistance in heart failure. Problem is, this one is super early so I'm not sure it's a meaningful asset from an investment standpoint.
SRDX:
Meh.
The sensitivity and specificity for ELISA based assays is already high. And arguably, the bulk of the sensitivity and specificity are a function of the quality of the antibody used in the assay.
This product is just nibbling around the edges, if you will.
I'm sure you're familiar with the Adobe suite... I mainly use Lightroom (photo management) and Illustrator (to make journal figures for publication).
Scrivener is a type of word processing program that has some additional tools meant for larger projects. It lets you set out sections, have cork boards for pasting info and ideas that you mean to incorporate, etc.. etc... Much better than a Word / Pages for larger projects. Not so useful if you're just sending a one page letter.
I use OmniFocus to capture ideas, plan out projects, jot down items I need to look into; OmniPlan to set up Gannt charts to monitor progress.
Igor Pro is by far the best graphing software out there. Very versatile, scriptable (you can create custom functions for fitting, etc..) and robust. I use it extensively for data analyses and to generate graphs for publications.
>Well, this website sells them (240 GB SSD for $440 or so) and the installation video makes it look like it is mainly unscrewing a large number of small screws <
It's absolutely that easy. You also found a good site for the hardware as well. The OWC 3g SSDs are very good.
Something like this and you're set: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/YSSDMP240/
>They say there is some way of cloning your hard drive onto the new hard drive but I wonder whether that really clones everything, including my bootcamp partition of windows vista etc. Not that I use it that often, but I have a piece of software on there -- Crystal ball - that I would not necessarily want to lose.<
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
SuperDuper makes exact clones of your hard drive, with all partitions, etc... I actually recommend it to everyone as a backup method over Time Machine. It will not save old versions of files, but will rather make perfect copies of your current HD when you want it. I've found having old versions of files is not useful... I've never tried to fetch one off a Time Machine backup.
If you go through with it I'll be happy to help. It is really, really easy.
OT:
ONTY:
I'll oversimply*. Exercises based on blended data rely heavily on the unknown (the performance of the control group) acting like a moderate-to-high precision, known value.
What's even worse in this case is they don't even have blended survival data, which is usually what people try to use as the basis for the analyses. These guys are basing it off blended recruitment data. No way no how are they anywhere near reality on their reasoning.
* if you want in depth analysis, put out a bat signal for iwfal. But I suspect he would not waste his time on this one.
ONTY
Rule number X: Blended curves aren't very useful, especially when they're just the enrollment.
This trial may or may not work, but the supposed deductive reasoning this guy is employing won't have anything to do with it.
OT:
It's somewhat funny to see people go through the mistakes in biotech investing / misinterpretations list. I don't know why it happens over and over, nor do I know why people who are receiving advice from more seasoned investors refuse to buy in.
Having followed the Ariad board until recently, you can see people methodically go through and execute each item on this list of misconceptions.
Another one to add to the list is the whole silly way that investors in early stage biotechs get all worked up as the annual meeting day approaches.
Rolling NDA:
Basically all companies do their submission on a rolling basis.
It has absolutely no bearing on the prospects or viability of an ongoing phase III program. In other words, a company with an ongoing phase III trial that starts a rolling NDA submission isn't sending a covert message to investors that the trial is a success.
Not exactly the same thing, but you can use flashblock on firefox... it turns the flash off as default on any site and only activates the flash content if you click it
I used something similar to this on safari and it was pretty good.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/
If you want it to run even cooler, uninstall flash from your computer and install the youtube5 extension on Safari. This will let you see youtube but it will cut out the other flash based ads etc... on websites. It makes a difference for both the CPU temp and battery life.
For those websites where you desperately need flash, you can run Google's Chrome browser for that site itself because this browser has a self-contained flash implementation.
Out of curiosity, have you removed any of the language localizations on your computer and/or messed around with them in any way?
For some reason* Office is very sensitive to all the localizations being present. If not, occasional updates will cease to work and you'll get strange crashes.
I really recommend Pages over Microsoft Word**. Much better program / user experience, and you can export to word without any problems.
I think Excel is really Microsoft's best program and is worth keeping. Otherwise, a switch from Word / Powerpoint to Pages / Keynote will not disappoint.
* probably because microsoft makes crappy software
** for people who do larger writing projects (grant applications / manuscripts) I really recommend Scrivener.
OT: ONTY
I remember Redplate from the Biomira / Theratope days. Definitely knowledgeable about why they made the drugs the way they did.
I'm simply skeptical that the desired mechanism of action is being observed in vivo.
OT:
I guess you can say I've been around the block.
I had some shares of Biomira back in the day.
ONTY:
If I remember the party line correctly, the low glycosylation of MUC1 was supposed to better expose the amino acid backbone covered by the BLP25 peptide sequence.
So we're talking a super subtle mechanism here.
Regardless, I don't think they really elicit a directed immune response so from my perspective it's not all that interesting.
ONTY:
Someone will have to explain to me how these people don't have serious __itis (for example, prostatitis) from the supposedly activated immune system attacking cells expressing the antigen.
At least theratope was putative aimed at a change that was supposed to be somewhat selective for cancerous cells. BLP25 is just against the primary sequence of MUC1, so it won't discriminate.
Anyways.
Good luck to all. But I wouldn't be surprised if this fails epically.
OT:
I realize I'm the annoying hippie on this board, but k-cups and starbucks coffee cups are really poor choices environmentally. I know that both are trying to work on this, but in the meantime it's producing much unnecessary waste.
MITI:
Small numbers but pretty great in my opinion.
Going off memory from previous trials, companies usually aim for about 450-500 events to get decent power in order to test for a 30% difference between the two arms of a ~700 patient trial.
So really they had little chance at the time of unblinding unless the efficacy was overwhelming. And at this point it is all post-hoc so I don't think it matters all that much.
It's our shout-out, gotcha society.
ARIA / INCY:
I think both those NDAs are a go.
INCY has clear efficacy so that should help ease any concerns about a new class of drug getting on the market. ARIA has efficacy and a bit of a rough safety profile, but that is a class effect that the FDA should be aware of.