Pharmaceutical Help Wanted

nursebee

nursebee

I'm researching past winners in the new drug business, am perhaps not old enough or aware enough to think of many new drugs as they came on the market. But I am picky in that I want the FIRST drug that a company brought to market.

For example, Amgen bringing forth EPO/Procrit.
Incyte bringing out Jakafi
Alexion and Solaris
If it were big, I'd look at something like an existing company JD Searle bringing out the BCP. The problem is JD Searle now part of a larger outfit.

I want the company to still be re searchable as far as the chart and data. My broker only goes back 20 years, yahoo seems to go further.

While I am focused on successful drugs being brought out, I need to balance this work looking at failures, so share those ideas also, hopefully the companies still have charts and data to examine.

Thank you for your assistance.
 
nursebee said:
I want the FIRST drug that a company brought to market.
More...


In my opinion, that may be a way of stacking the probabilistic deck slightly against yourself, overall, because these days the cost of the research and development processes necessarily behind the product licensing of "super-remedies" is typically far beyond the budget of most companies' first products, and to the extent that there are exceptions, the factors involved in their success stories often seem to have a pretty high element of more-or-less random luck involved in their etiologies.

The reports of very occasional overwhelming successes are, of course, very appealing, but it's terribly easy to overlook the fact that there's inevitably a huge component of statistical survivorship-bias behind their emergence.

(I'd perhaps be looking at the forthcoming new generations of Aricept-like products for the treatment of Alzheimer's, myself, if wanting to invest in individual stocks, because that's undoubtedly going to be a very big market over the next 5-10 years).
 
Good luck with what you are doing Xela, it is not where my interest lies.

I stacked the probabilites against myself when I did not buy ALXN on my watch list when it was $25, same thing for JAZZ though it does not fit what I am looking at now.
 
Watching Cramer, gave two more examples for me to research
REGN $5-$475
Receptos, bought out, tough to find a chart.
 
Regarding "survivorship bias" in drug development companies, another thing to take into account is that some companies have gone back to the equity markets over and over again to raise capital, and have repeatedly undergone reverse splits; so even though the stock price today may be relatively high, the first round of (public) equity holders may have lost 99%+ of their original investment. Some companies can keep this going for 10+ years. That's not to say that they're bad companies per se, but sometimes things don't work out so well, and it's not obvious unless you're careful with corporate actions, and many data sources occasionally botch reverse splits (with the wrong ratio, wrong ex-date, etc.).
 
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