Curis, Inc. Message Board

I wonder if folks are getting a look at Kadcyla scrips for April about now and seeing a much higher than expected uptake by the medical community.

Chinese Hamsters

The $30 price target seems aggressive to me by the end of the year. I also think the author is bullish on IMGN for some of the wrong reasons. The pipeline does hold a lot of promise, but lots of early stage molecules look really good. I still believe that every analyst that follows this company is under estimating the sales potential that Kadcyla will eventually have, and what that royalty stream will mean to IMGN. It won't just be some money to pay the bills, but a meaningful catalyst to grow the companies bottom line for the foreseeable future and beyond.

It's pretty straight forward math at this point. Kadcyla is priced at double Herceptin, and Roche has voiced every intent of transitioning their Herceptin franchise over to Kadcyla as label expansion permits, plus they are looking at it in some oncology indications that Herceptin is not currently approved for. Herceptin had world wide sales of $6.4 billion last year. Kadcyla will by 2018 likely be over $10 billion in sales.

Chinese Hamsters

Finally was able to read this post on IV. First response is huh? This is not worded at all like a patent, it sounds more like an abstract for a poster for an oncology meeting. And the comparator they used was Rituxan? Theoretically Rituxan would have zero impact on breast cancer as that antibody is targeted at B-cell lymphomas. Totally different target. Further, I'm not even sure what the claim here is for the patent. This is a pretty broad net they are casting to try and claim first dibs on something. As Fib said earlier, pretty much non-material for what we are looking for over the next couple of years.

Chinese Hamsters

This is what I have been expecting to see out of CRIS for over a month now. We still have the EU approval yet to come. Surprised to see Australia approval ahead of the EU. Hopefully we will start to see some better month over month increases in sales as Roche makes more health care folks aware of this new drug.

Chinese Hamsters

The IV board will not display any of the Roche messages for me, some error. I don't see any press on the company web site either. Can you copy and paste what you saw to this board?

Chinese Hamsters

I would give the market a little time to digest whatever the FED will feed it this week out of its 2-day meeting. Currently they are putting about $45 billion a month into this market which has skewed the fundamentals on practically everything. I don't think we see any positive or negative news out of IMGN until we see the quarterly figures for Kadcyla sometime in July. If the market believes the FED will continue or potentially increase QE for infinity, then it will be party on. Thus, I think IMGN will trade with market sentiment until we see more information on Kadcyla sales.

Chinese Hamsters

ECYT approach looks pretty good too, and they are way ahead of IMGN on this target. So buy some ECYT, that's what I did. IMGN will largely be the story about growth in Kadcyla as the quarterly sales ramp, and additional data comes in for the multiple trials it is in. Kadcyla is a compelling enough story to see the stock double from here in the next 18 months or so.

Chinese Hamsters

Dude, your killing yourself with being upset with this management team. I have certainly seen better I admit, but honestly they are doing what every other management team in almost any company these days are doing. Have they been unethical? Maybe, to the morality of you or me, but they have not done anything that is illegal. The ironic thing is they are actually their own worst enemies. This last investor briefing day they hosted was filled with all sorts of what I would consider rookie mistakes. They set up a feeding frenzy of questions around the 901 by telling the analysts they had observed dose related peripheral neuropathy issues, thus setting back the program. They should have then answered all anticipated questions in a proactive manner, yet they left the door open for interpretation and a lot of time for the analysts to stew about it. That was almost the sole focus of the Q&A.

The other thing that floored me was the CFO presentation. What he was presented represented 10s of millions of dollars in capital costs, new personnel, and multiple clinical trials. When you say you are going to build out your clinical manufacturing network it can mean a lot of things. What he focused on was additional people, facilities, and equipment. Either he is naive or stupid, as any appreciable sized clinical facility could cost upwards of $300 to $400 million. Then to staff it and run multiple fast tracked clinical trials? They have $200 million in the bank, not $200 billion. This had to make these analysts scratch their heads because the amount of spend he described this year is beyond their current scope, and it did not match the guidance they gave either. So I don't know what the CFO was even thinking with the hot mess of a presentation. The other thing regarding Kadcyla royalties, "We are aware we have the ability to monetize that royalty and have no plans to do so at the current time". What does that even mean? I could go on.

Chinese Hamsters

Please post back from time to time and let us know how your wife progresses. Good luck in both your new investment and your wife's treatments

Chinese Hamsters

Agree, the author missed the mark here, and maybe it was intentional? The drug they are talking about here is a kinase inhibitor (Palbociclib). This particular kinase inhibitor interferes with a cell beginning to ready itself for division. The other drug it was paired with (Famara) is a aromatase inhibitor, and aromatase is the enzyme that synthesizes estrogen. Neither of these drugs should have any particular affinity for HER2+ markers at all. What is really interesting here is that combining these two drugs together had such an amazing outcome. It does not look like Palbociclib was used as a single agent in its own arm of the clinical trial however.

So I was actually thinking just the opposite of this being a competitor, but rather at some future point this becomes a complementary therapy. Perhaps due to the mode of action of one or both of these drugs they may greatly enhance the effectiveness of Kadcyla. It would be interesting to know why they theorized that these two drugs in combination with each other would have such a dramatic impact to the progression free survival.

Chinese Hamsters

The Kadcyla sales for the quarter were actually pretty impressive. Consider they got approval on Feb 22nd, so those sales only reflect about 35 or so days of sales. Also consider that this is only approval in the US that accounts for this level of uptake. We could get EMEA approval anytime I suppose. It was filed in August, but I don't believe the EMEA granted an expedited review, so they may take as along as a year before we see our first approval there.

Chinese Hamsters

At the average daily volume it would take the shorts 11 days to cover. Why on earth would you short this stock at this point?

Chinese Hamsters

That amount equates to a little more than 2000 patients being treated, and this is not a full quarter either. I would say were off to a really good start. Go go go Kadcyla (pronounced like Godzilla).

Chinese Hamsters

And I guess we will see how CRIS the dog does tomorrow as well as Roche will also have Erivedge sales data. Expectations are perhaps too high for Erivedge just yet. We are still waiting for EMEA approval and the market size will likely double once the can expand the label for operable BCC. Expect sales of maybe $13 to $14 million for Q4. Puny I know, but growing.

Chinese Hamsters

Well we added almost $800 million in market cap on a pre-clinical finding. Go figure, but I will take it. IMGN is by far my largest holding in my portfolio so a 5% up day is very nice. Seems like a lot of money is coming into biotech right now. CRIS also having a nice up day.

Chinese Hamsters

I believe the analysts will get a wake up call as soon as Roche shows how Kadcyla is selling. Virtually every estimate I have seen from every analysts way way way underestimates the potential for Kadcyla. Why I don;t know, Roche has given them patient population numbers and now they have the pricing, and it priced at a lot more than I had originally estimated, double Herception basically. Sales data will drive the stock higher this year, and any positive news out of the pipeline will be gravy. You held it through the tough part, were approved now.

Chinese Hamsters

Hey Oncodoc, what are your thoughts on the ligand-conjugate approach that Endocyte is using? Are you aware of any drugs that have used a ligand approach? I am wondering it this would be an entirely new entity that the FDA has not seen before. Like a first in class type of drug.

Chinese Hamsters

So their approach is to use a ligand to target the cancer cell, and attached to the ligand is their linker and then a small cell killing molecule. Their small molecule works by inhibiting or breaking up a protein called tubulin. Tubulin is critical to a cell to divide, it makes up what is called the spindle fibers that pull the chromosomes apart when a cell divides. So mechanistically, very much the same way that Immunogen's DM1 works. The big difference here is the ligand vs antibody. I think the antibody approach is extremely well proven as we have a number of approved drugs and history of their use for well over 10 years now. The ligand approach is still pretty new, and I am not aware of any approved drugs using a ligand approach. To me, these guys are quite a ways behind SGEN and IMGN, and even if the ligand approach works better than antibodies, they are going to be late to the party. That does not mean you cannot make money on the optimism of their success. They might have a few years of really good compelling clinical data that could drive the stock price up. My two cents.l

Chinese Hamsters