Replies to post #95813 on Biotech Values

[mcbio]

Re: ACHN

This was more propaganda by Dr. Dietrich, IMO, although perhaps not as outrageous as his claims about qD dosing of ribavirin (#msg-50207074). To date, there’s no empirical evidence that ACH-1625 has a significantly higher barrier to resistance than other PI’s—it merely has a very long half-life, which is more of a negative than a positive (#msg-46185187).

ACHN’s having a hired hand like Dr. Dietrich on the conference call suggests to me that ACHN itself is not confident about the commercial outlook for ACHN-1625. Perhaps prospective partners have passed on licensing the drug because it has a very long half-life. If this is the case, ACHN should be up-front about it instead of engaging a shill like Dietrich to make wildly bullish assertions about ACH-1625 that have no basis in fact.

Clearly ACH-1625 is in its early days and I'll take Dr. Dietrich's comments with a healthy degree of skepticism. With respect to the long half-life being more of a negative than a positive, isn't this really only an issue if the drug does turn out to have some legitimate safety issues (which we haven't seen to date)? Aside from the safety angle, how is having a long half-life an issue with respect to coformulation with other HCV compounds?

All told, notwithstanding the questions that remain to be answered for ACH-1625, I think the market is pretty much discounting any success for ACHN given the ~$100M market cap.