Sarepta Therapeutics (SRPT)

[leoncio1]

Barron's wrote: "AVI is looking for a large partner to further the
development of its muscular-dystrophy drug, and the government contract could
help that effort. One potential partner is Pfizer (PFE), which is eager to
bolster its unimpressive drug pipeline and has an initiative targeting rare
diseases."

This seems likely, especially in light of the fact that one of PFE's target diseases under their rare disease initiative is DMD.

Barron's did get one fact not quite right though - they described AVI's cash burn rate as $25M/year. This ($25M/yr) has actually been their operating budget for the last several years - their net cash burn rate has been about half this - $12 - $14M/yr - due to a fairly steady govt contract revenue, and they currently have over $40M in cash.

With the two NEW larger govt contracts ($18M for flu and $291M for ebola / marburg), they should be able to reduce their net burn rate substantially, if not eliminate it entirely. I believe most if not all of the $18M flu contract is intended to be spent entirely this year (since the larger follow-on award is anticipated by Dec 30, 2010, per govt RFP), and of the $291M Ebola / Marburg contract, the first $80M is released to be spent over the next 18 months. BOE, assuming that 20% of this ($80M) can be spent over the next 6 months, and assuming $4M of the flu award has already been spent, we should see a total of about $30M spent over the next 6 months on these two projects. It will be interesting to hear at the upcoming quarterly conf call how this new revenue stream (more than 2x AVI's previous operating budget) will affect earnings guidance.

I copyed this from yahoo-finance from Dr_mysterio.. thx I wanted to share this good posting on I-Hub..

Gltya..