Biotech Values

[mcbio]

OMER - Orphan GPCRs?

I just saw a thread on this company over on SI and it's the first I'd heard of it. OMER went public last year at $10/share and the stock is now at just under $8/share for about a $165M market cap.

They seem to have a diverse group of programs (which can be good or bad depending on your viewpoint), but what I'm most curious about is their alleged expertise surrounding GPCRs. Drugs targeting GPCRs have been a pretty big success and I don't think there are any arguments about that (OMER's Web site indicates that 30-40% of all drugs sold worldwide are GPCR-targeted drugs). OMER claims that its expertise pertains to orphan GPCRs, which are GPCRs that have no known ligand which makes it difficult to develop drugs to target them. OMER claims it has rights to acquire a cellular redistribution assay that can identify agonists, antagonists, and inverse agonists that target these orphan GPCRs. OMER claims it has developed knock-out mice to further characterize these orphan GPCRs and claims that it will be "unlocking" several orphan GPCRs by the end of this year. They hope to partner with big pharma on these targets. Here are links to OMER's discussion of GPCRs and their pipeline as a whole: http://www.omeros.com/pipeline/gpcr.htm and http://www.omeros.com/pipeline/pipeline.htm .

Any comments on the likelihood of success here? I would imagine that big pharma has been involved in trying to target these orphan GPCRs before given the potential. Any reason to believe OMER may have a chance to succeed where others have presumably failed?