Interessante bijdragen weer op Yahoo forum:
Van Breeze: NTLA is raising $400M. Two of the lead underwriters at Goldman & Leerink, and guess who the analysts are that cover both ARWR and NTLA? If you think the S-3 got written overnight, well, it didn't. That $400M has to come from somewhere, so indexes and institutions make room from the related allocation in their portfolios. And a $400M cash raise is a fairly large amount by most standards, particularly for a company with Phase 1 results, only two clinical programs, with N=6 and a 28-day follow up on safety and efficacy, and an unwillingness to share longer term safety data (ie. 56 days, 112 days), and… an already sky high valuation given where they are at (NTLA mkt cap = ARWR’s). So, without trying to detract from the NTLA science, which is pretty cool on its own, what you see is a coordinated "marketing" effort. How did the NPR interview and USA Today headlines happen so quickly? What about the NEJM publication concurrently w/ public release of the Phase 1 NTLA-2001 data? Mani Foorohar is a Managing Director at Leerink, which is unbelievable, but you know what pays his salary? M&A and underwriting fees to the firm. Look, ARWR got the same treatment when they needed to raise $250M cash at $58 with a much less mature pipeline than where they are at now (though much more mature than where NTLA is now). And Goldman pulled out all the stops, stabilized the share price to make it levitate above the $58 offering for a few weeks, was probably was instrumental in getting CA to appear on Cramer's show, etc. This is the game.
The question you need to consider is whether or not CRISPR in the liver is truly a competitive threat. We all like to think ARO-ENAC is a competitive threat to Vertex, and that RNAi has pretty much replaced small molecule. But we also need to “watch our six” as they say, so here’s my opinion on CRISPR. Intellia has now proven that at 28-days from a single dose, knockdown is on par with Alnylam’s Galnac follow-on drug, Vutrisiran. But ATTR is not an unmet medical need – there is an approved treatment (Alnylam’s Patisiran, their first approved drug, which is LNP) that has already passed through the safety hurdles and the clinical trials gauntlet. So the burden is on Intellia to prove to the FDA, and ultimately to doctors and to patients if it gets there, that the convenience of a “single” dose (and we still don’t know if the liver will start producing mutant cells again over time, so that’s why “single” is in quotes) is worth the potential risks, particularly when efficacy will be VERY similar. The same will be true for other liver targets in Intellia’s pipeline (which include A1AT and PH). Where Intellia might get to market quicker is if they are treating a life-threatening disease that doesn’t already have a safe and approved treatment. So, that’s a long way of saying that I don’t think CRISPR will “win” the liver. RNAi companies like Arrowhead, Alnylam and Dicerna have a significant lead and less competition (how many CRISPR companies will be going after the same targets w/ their modality)?
Stay off options, stay off margin, take an ownership perspective and look at the business and where you see it in a few years (or whatever your time horizon is). If you need the cash now, sell and don’t look back. I’ll be adding more on any weakness.