Feuerstein's Biotech-Stock Mailbag

Welcome back to the Mailbag, which unfortunately was closed most of the week because I was in New York at the UBS Global Life Sciences Conference.

I'll return to your emails next week, but in the meantime, here are some reports and updates from the conference. This week:

• Sangamo BioSciences(SGMO Quote)
• Medarex(MEDX Quote)
• Dendreon(DNDN Quote)
• Telik(TELK Quote)
• Encysive Pharmaceuticals(ENCY Quote)

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Two institutional investor friends of mine brought up Sangamo this week in separate conversations. On the same day, my BlackBerry buzzed with an email from a retail investor and InvestorVillage.com message board poster informing me that he had "upgraded" Sangamo to "possibly the next Celgene(CELG Quote), but definitely the next Alnylam(ALNY Quote)."

I haven't thought much about Sangamo since writing about the company in early August, so I looked at the chart and was surprised to see the stock's move from $10 to $14.

Memo to James Altucher: Sangamo is a rocket stock!

All kidding aside, Sangamo does have an interesting story to tell. As I described back in August, the company is engineering protein "switches" called zinc fingers that can turn genes on or off. It's similar to the work being done with RNA interference, or RNAi, with one big difference: RNAi can only turn genes off while zinc finger proteins have the ability to turn genes on and off.