Feuerstein's Biotech Mailbag

Welcome to the first "biotech mailbag" column. I get a lot of great reader email and feedback, which I try hard to answer directly. But often, there are questions asked or issues raised that could benefit a wider audience.

So consider this new regular column -- weekly, I hope, so keep the email flowing -- a chance to ask me questions about biotech or take me to task for something I wrote. I'll pick the best of the mail and address it here. Now, off to the mailbag.

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Elemer Piros, a research analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, is more bullish on Neurochem(NRMX) and its Alzheimer's drug Alzhemed than I was in my column this week. While he agrees that the ongoing Alzhemed phase III study is high-risk, he is more optimistic that results will be positive. Specifically, Piros says I neglected an issue with the study that girds his confidence.

Piros writes that my column failed to "observe that these patients were on memory enhancers (80% on Aricept) on average for 20 months before they entered this 18-month study. You ignore the possibility that most of these patients were probably declining when they entered the study, and fail to reconcile this with the observation that 36% of the total (latest blinded analysis) has improved on average at the end of the 18 month experiment." (Piros has a market outperform rating on Neurochem, and his firm has done banking for the company in the past 12 months.)