I see no discussion of this anywhere, but Google seems to have implemented real time stock quotes. All the better for watching the price of SIGA Technologies move ever upward!
I first tipped you to SIGA on 6/9/08 when the stock price was $2.92, gloated about it on 1/28/09 at $4.29, and it is at this moment (real time!) $6.28. And will be up to $15 by year's end. I'm not usually one for touting sure things, but read on.
The government will buy a huge quantity of smallpox meds in September, and is currently gathering proposals from drug companies. Aside from SIGA, only one other company has a drug that could conceivably fit the bill, and their monkeys died during testing. SIGA's smallpox drug, ST-246, was safe enough to heal a child with a smallpox-like illness a couple years ago. It was nearly instantly effective and had no side effects.
So the contract will go to SIGA, whose 35 million outstanding shares will surely shoot skyward when the check comes in for between 1.7 million and 12 million courses of a fairly expensive drug (and one with a finite shelf life, so stockpiles will need periodic replacement). And that's just the beginning. Other government agencies (defense, homeland security) will want to buy, and Europe, Israel, and India should also be interested. Plus, SIGA has, in its pipeline, drugs for dengue fever (feared a possible future pandemic), drug-resistent staph and strep and a broad spectrum anti-viral (ST-669) that just might crack the virus puzzle once and for all. None of that stuff factors into its stock price at this point, which has yet to catch up even with the in-the-bag smallpox contract...though in the past week or two, volume and price are both starting to pick up.
SIGA keeps a low-profile, burying all this goodness amid dry scientific writing for reasons I explained in that first posting. So very few people have caught on.
James Leff -- I've been a SIGA investor for years, but it was only today that your blog hit the SIGA Yahoo message board, and I had a look. Everything you say is sensible, and spot on. The RFP put out by BARDA calls, among other things, for efficacy against monkeypox, and SIGA's only competitor (Chimerix) admits on their website that... their monkeys did, well, die. ST-246 is effective against monkeypox, and all other poxes, including biogenetically-engineered versions, which is what bioterror folk fear.
ReplyDeleteEven though you mentioned Siga's broad-range anti-pathogen ST-669, did you have a look at the viruses it has shown activity against?!? It includes 8 FAMILIES of viruses, including those including polio, HIV, hepatitis, ebola, leukemia, the common cold, and much much more. A pipe dream, perhaps, but an astounding one. It's on their website.
Re: ST-669, a miracle, yes, if it works (I'm a little optimistic given the unusual safety and efficacy of ST-246 and, after at least some testing, a couple of their other drugs). Of course, it'll take forever to test and approve such a drug, as the drug will have to not only cure all those ills, but prove it can cure each of them in separate trials. If a broad-spectrum miracle drug - even a highly effective one - gets approved in under fifteen years, it'd be a miracle! The strep/staph drug would be huge, too, and a lot easier to test/approve...
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