Westeffer: Good call on NNVC. You mentioned it last week, and I started doing some DD. Not fast enough though. I missed out on this impressive run. But I'll continue to follow it and watch it and will see about taking a position when it levels off. By the way, AVII is up nicely today on great Phase I results in their lead compound for Hepatitis C. This is a disease I have had an interest in for years, as it is a huge cost to the nation's health care sysytem, and the current treatment of ribivirin and interferon is costly, wrought with side effects and is unsuccessful in over half the cases. The AVII compound is the real deal for Hep C, in my opinion. It covers all four of the most prevalent serotypes. Side effects, thus far, have been non existent. It was given to primates at 40 times the estimated human dose with no toxicity. It is so precisely constructed (an antisense oligomer) it has only one possible target of action...the Hep C virus. It doesn't cause side effects because there is no comparable binding site in the human body, unlike what is seen with almost all traditional small molecule drugs. I think the drug will eventually get fast tracked if it shows efficacy in Phase II and the side effect profile stays benign. The disease is taxing the health care system severely, especially in our prison populations. Thus, there is going to pressure from state and federal prison health officials and Medicaid administrators for an alternative that keeps these patients from developing liver failure, which can be a slow and expensive road to death.
AI
