Replies to post #143729 on Biotech Values

[mcbio]

My main point though is that I'm not investing in a portfolio of all oncology drugs under development - indeed I'd be happy to short the entire basket if I could as a pair trade against my longs. Rather I've picked a few that I think will be successful - ARIA, PCYC and MDVN as my substantial picks, with very much smaller positions in a handful of smaller oncology companies that I think have a differentiated drug.

Well said. Your comments mesh fairly well with my thoughts on the subject (#msg-76261972 ). All told, I'm not going to abandon ship on my oncology-related holdings based on this article.

[DewDiligence]

I think the same point can be made with virtually any area of drug development. For example, there are over 1,400 studies on rheumatoid arthritis listed on clinicaltrials.org.

I respectfully disagree.

You seem to have missed the point of Booth’s article and the related thread on this board. If a given indication such as RA has a large number of cumulative clinical trials because there’s a large number of trials on average per drug candidate, this is bullish rather than bearish for the companies running such trials insofar as it facilitates product differentiation.

The drug-development problem in cancer that Booth and I wrote about in #msg-76302922 and #msg-76543850 is not the large number of clinical trials per candidate, but rather the excessive number of drug candidates per se and the similarity of many of the candidates in terms of the target and mechanism of action.