Titan Pharmaceuticals Inc (TTNP)

[Doctor Detroit]

Dr. Cidambi (Long)

1. The name sounded familiar. She is a psychiatrist. She has a vested interest in patients coming to see her every week. Probuphine potentially gets in the way of that. From last week's NPR piece:

In the meantime, some doctors say they will hold off on using the implant. Dr. Indra Cidambi, who treats addiction patients in New Jersey, says she's worried patients will assume it's enough, that they don't need the check-ups or the counseling that are part of most recovery programs.

"Probuphine is set up for failure in that way," said Cidambi, "because the patient will be seen after six months and in the meantime, they're not going to be following up with therapy. And that means it's not going to be medication assisted therapy — it is medication maintenance only."

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/27/479755813/long-acting-opioid-treatment-could-be-available-in-a-month

2. According to her web listings and the article linked below, she is happy to prescribe suboxone to her patients. So all of the buprenorphine related criticisms in her article would also apply to suboxone, which she prescribes to her own patients. So what’s the deal?

3. She can’t do the implant procedure. Admitted as much earlier this year:

“…these implantables are not conducive for the common prescribers, what do I mean by that, and that if you see the Buprenorphine that’s being prescribed 32% of the prescriptions for Buprenorphine, naloxone sublingual tablets are the pills have been written by General Practitioners, Family Medicine Practitioners and Doctor of Osteopathy. While some of these guys are prepared to do some minor surgical procedure while others are not because they implant itself is a minor surgical procedure, okay. So 22% of the Suboxone prescriptions were written by psychiatrists, these professions are not trained to do a minor surgical procedure, but even that’s not a big deal. You can train these, the doctors and we can get that thing but then we don’t have offices that are equipped to do this kind of minor surgical procedure there. So that is a big issue, even if the Probuphine, the marketed….

http://healthprofessionalradio.com.au/2016/02/26/dr-indra-cidambi-ambulatory-detox/