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DewDiligence

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DewDiligence

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Re: None

Sunday, 07/24/2005 2:39:54 PM

Sunday, July 24, 2005 2:39:54 PM

Post# of 252429
Musings on Geron…

The latest deal between GERN and MRK (#msg-7011876) was not especially interesting from a financial standpoint because the amount of money changing hands now is presumably tiny.

However, what does impress me about this deal is this characterization by MRK’s Dr. Stephen Friend:

>>
“We at Merck are excited about what Geron has demonstrated with telomerase in cancer. Our objective is to combine our technologies with the hope of bringing a product to market that may have application across a large number of cancers," said Stephen Friend, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president, Advanced Technology and Oncology at Merck Research Laboratories. "This is a project of high interest and commitment at Merck, and is indicative of Merck's strategic direction in developing new anti-cancer therapies.”
<<

Ordinarily, I would dismiss a comment like this as pure fluff. But Dr. Friend is not an ordinary guy—rather, he has a reputation as a brilliant, no-BS scientist. Moreover, Friend sold his genomics/informatics company, Rosetta Inpharmatics, to MRK for $620M in 2001.

The following post—from a Fast Company article in 2001—is a good read on Dr. Friend and his accomplishments. I also have a modicum of more personal info to rely on also. When my wife was working for a small Massachusetts biotech firm in the 1990’s, Dr. Friend, who was then affiliated with Harvard Medical School, was on the company’s SAB, and Friend frequently attended the “chalk talk” sessions with employees. She said back then that Friend was the polar opposite of the arrogant jerks you often find on the SAB of these kinds of young companies.

Getting back to the main point… if Dr. Friend thinks Geron’s telomerase science is as worthy an endeavor as he makes it sound in the bold-faced quotation above, perhaps GERN is a company with some bona fide investment appeal.

“The efficient-market hypothesis may be
the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated
in any area of human knowledge!”

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