Eastbourne Capital, one of the shareholders who waged a proxy contest over Amylin Pharmaceuticals earlier this year, has sold its entire stake in that company, according to an SEC filing.
There are twelve seats on the Amylin board. Five of them were up for grabs at the meeting in May. The dissidents won two of those five.
Amylin, a San Diego based pharma company (NASDAQ:AMLN), focuses on drugs for the treatment of diabetes and obesity.
Dissidents have expressed frustration with some of the deals Amylin's management has cut, especially a partnership with giant Eli Lilly.
The stock price was between $11 and $11.50 at the time of that annual meeting. It rose in subsequent weeks, getting as far as $15.50 in early August, though the price has lost some of those gains since. Even with the recent slide, the stock price has considerably outperformed the Nasdaq-100 index in recent months.
This news made me curious about the size of the market for diabetes treatments. A little googling discovered the abstract of a book on the subject, INNOVATIONS IN THE MANAGEMENT OF DIABETES published last year.
The abstract begins: "Diabetes has become the fifth leading cause of death across developed markets, and cases of the disease are forecast to grow by 7.1% across the globe by 2013. The market for innovative diabetes treatments will be driven by this projected rise in prevalence, together with the substantial unmet need for drugs that can effectively halt or reverse disease progression. Although extended lifecycle management for existing antidiabetic therapies may offer sales growth in the short term, the development of new drugs from novel classes will become increasingly important in the future."
Showing posts with label San Diego. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Diego. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sequenom Shake-up
The former Chief Executive of Sequenom Inc., Harry Stylli, is out of a job effective as of Monday, September 28. So are three of the other officers of that biotech company: including the CFO and the head of R&D.
Sequenom, a company based in San Diego, Calif., owns a proprietary DNA analysis platform. (And no, I'm not quite sure that that means -- it sounds like a software system for genetic/diagnostic tests.)
A year ago, shares of Sequenom (Nasdaq: SQNM) were worth more than $21, and the most promising product in its pipeline was a new system for the prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome, a system that was said to be both safer and more comfortable (for both mother and fetus) than the diagnostic methods now in use.
Unfortunately, the data for the tests that were underway last year can not be relied upon. On Monday, along with Stylli's departure, Sequenom announced the result of its investigation of problems, specifically mishandling "the protocols and controls for the conduct of studies" on its Down Syndrome screen. This was of course a huge setback, although it had already been largely discounted in the stock price.
The company came under some criticism in the business press (though for reasons unrelated to the Down Syndrome product and its specific difficulties) last October. The price fell from $21 to, by Thanksgiving 2008, about $14. Then it recovered, getting all the way to above $24 in time for the inauguration of a new President.
The inauguration was accomnpanied by optimism in its sector, because the new administration was and is widely thought of as friendly to investment in bio-medical research.
But then the price started to slide, as if the market as a collective organism thought something big was in the offing. The price was back at $14 just before the first official announcement of the data's unreliability in late April -- and the start of the investigation just completed -- then the price bellyflopped immediately to $3.30 a share. It has been flailing along at the bottom of the price chart ever since, although as some life was coming back to the broader market some life seemed to be returning to this stock, too, and it got back to $6.
Then came this annoucement of the results of the investigation and the executive suite shake-up Monday evening, after trading had closed. Yesterday, Tuesday, the stock was back to the mid-spring 2009 prices, between $3 and $4.
Sequenom, a company based in San Diego, Calif., owns a proprietary DNA analysis platform. (And no, I'm not quite sure that that means -- it sounds like a software system for genetic/diagnostic tests.)
A year ago, shares of Sequenom (Nasdaq: SQNM) were worth more than $21, and the most promising product in its pipeline was a new system for the prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome, a system that was said to be both safer and more comfortable (for both mother and fetus) than the diagnostic methods now in use.
Unfortunately, the data for the tests that were underway last year can not be relied upon. On Monday, along with Stylli's departure, Sequenom announced the result of its investigation of problems, specifically mishandling "the protocols and controls for the conduct of studies" on its Down Syndrome screen. This was of course a huge setback, although it had already been largely discounted in the stock price.
The company came under some criticism in the business press (though for reasons unrelated to the Down Syndrome product and its specific difficulties) last October. The price fell from $21 to, by Thanksgiving 2008, about $14. Then it recovered, getting all the way to above $24 in time for the inauguration of a new President.
The inauguration was accomnpanied by optimism in its sector, because the new administration was and is widely thought of as friendly to investment in bio-medical research.
But then the price started to slide, as if the market as a collective organism thought something big was in the offing. The price was back at $14 just before the first official announcement of the data's unreliability in late April -- and the start of the investigation just completed -- then the price bellyflopped immediately to $3.30 a share. It has been flailing along at the bottom of the price chart ever since, although as some life was coming back to the broader market some life seemed to be returning to this stock, too, and it got back to $6.
Then came this annoucement of the results of the investigation and the executive suite shake-up Monday evening, after trading had closed. Yesterday, Tuesday, the stock was back to the mid-spring 2009 prices, between $3 and $4.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Three Books, briefly
1. I wrote last week of a forthcoming book about the demise of Bear Stearns, BEAR TRAP, and about my efforts to obtain a review copy.
I'd like to report now that I have seen a copy, and that the book is something of a disappointment.
The opening paragraphs, in which the authors compare themselves to Shakespeare and Dreiser, should have been a tip-off. If you have a good story to tell, you can launch right into it and let it tell itself.
2. A more interesting read by far, Joe Nocera's GOOD GUYS & BAD GUYS. The bulk of this book is a "best of" collection of articles and columns going back to the 1980s. The new material generally updates or seeks to draw connections amongst the collected material.
Some oil-industry history: In 1982, when T. Boone Pickens, founder of Mesa Petroleum, offered to buy a much larger company, Cities Service Company, which was more generally known by the name Citgo, the target company responded by offering to buy Mesa. High drama played out in the suites of southern Manhattan for weeks as the two fish struggled to see who would swallow whom.
Neither offer ever actually closed, but the upshot of it was that Pickens made his name as a wheeler-dealer on a very big scale, and Citgo was put "in play" in the markets. By the end of that decade, it had been sold (through steps I won't relate here) to the nation of Venezuela.
Anyway, Joe Nocera got a journalistic coup out of this intense bidding war. He was there, in the hotel suite with Pickens and his brains trust, through the thick of it, and it became the October 1982 cover story for Texas Monthly. That chapter makes a very compelling read and a great jumpstart to this book.
3. Or consider Roger Lowenstein's latest, While America Aged, about (as the lengthy subtitle aptly says), "how pension debts ruined General Motors, stopped the NYC subways, Bankruptcy San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis."
The "devil's pack" that too many managements have struck with too many unions over the years in the US is: labor peace in return for unfunded pension promises. The managers who strike this deal may be either private, quasi-public, or fully public. The bargain is the same. It is the sort of bargain that a credit-card addict makes with himself. "I'll save my cash and soothe my spending impulses at the same time by using the plastic."
One neat detail from the San Diego case study: In October 2001, that city's chief of human relations, Cathy Lexin, expressed her growing unease about the pension's earnings numbers vis-à-vis its liabilities in a very eloquent way in an email she sent to the assistant city auditor. The subject line of the email read: EEEK.
I'd like to report now that I have seen a copy, and that the book is something of a disappointment.
The opening paragraphs, in which the authors compare themselves to Shakespeare and Dreiser, should have been a tip-off. If you have a good story to tell, you can launch right into it and let it tell itself.
2. A more interesting read by far, Joe Nocera's GOOD GUYS & BAD GUYS. The bulk of this book is a "best of" collection of articles and columns going back to the 1980s. The new material generally updates or seeks to draw connections amongst the collected material.
Some oil-industry history: In 1982, when T. Boone Pickens, founder of Mesa Petroleum, offered to buy a much larger company, Cities Service Company, which was more generally known by the name Citgo, the target company responded by offering to buy Mesa. High drama played out in the suites of southern Manhattan for weeks as the two fish struggled to see who would swallow whom.
Neither offer ever actually closed, but the upshot of it was that Pickens made his name as a wheeler-dealer on a very big scale, and Citgo was put "in play" in the markets. By the end of that decade, it had been sold (through steps I won't relate here) to the nation of Venezuela.
Anyway, Joe Nocera got a journalistic coup out of this intense bidding war. He was there, in the hotel suite with Pickens and his brains trust, through the thick of it, and it became the October 1982 cover story for Texas Monthly. That chapter makes a very compelling read and a great jumpstart to this book.
3. Or consider Roger Lowenstein's latest, While America Aged, about (as the lengthy subtitle aptly says), "how pension debts ruined General Motors, stopped the NYC subways, Bankruptcy San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis."
The "devil's pack" that too many managements have struck with too many unions over the years in the US is: labor peace in return for unfunded pension promises. The managers who strike this deal may be either private, quasi-public, or fully public. The bargain is the same. It is the sort of bargain that a credit-card addict makes with himself. "I'll save my cash and soothe my spending impulses at the same time by using the plastic."
One neat detail from the San Diego case study: In October 2001, that city's chief of human relations, Cathy Lexin, expressed her growing unease about the pension's earnings numbers vis-à-vis its liabilities in a very eloquent way in an email she sent to the assistant city auditor. The subject line of the email read: EEEK.
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