Exciting week

There's been a lot of excitement this week in my MFI and One Up portfolios.

Cubist's competitor Theravance (THRX) announced results of a clinical trial that were OK but still had some toxicity issues. CBST had dipped by about $4 over the last several weeks, and had been working its way back up. On these results, CBST jumped ~ $1.50 to about $24. Their antibiotic Cubicin is now predicted to be profitable for quite a while. Cubicin will be first-to-market, and is expected to pick up the market which can be anywhere from $200M to $2B or so. And this will only increase as the anti-infective vancomycin increases in failures when antibiotic resistance spreads, probably several years from now. Cubist is on its way to profitability. I expect (and analysts generally agree, from the couple of reports that I looked at) for CBST to achieve profitability as soon as next quarter, and to increase market share for a while to come.

Despite this good news for Cubicin, a product in competition, vancocin (the trade name of vancomycin) did not suffer. Yesterday, the stock price of VPHM was surprisingly unaffected by the good news for CBST, and now today Cowen upgraded VPHM, which sent that stock up as well. The prediction there is that a generic will take longer to hit the market than initially thought due to procedural changes at the FDA. Seems to me that this makes generics of vancocin a nonstarter: I would predict resistance to vancocin to be widespread within a few years, making it not worth the money to develop. But what it does make for is a good MFI stock, with a limited time to hold onto, and a (loose) timeframe for sale.

In the meantime. MEDX has been creeping upward over the last couple of weeks. After it's most recent low point, it is now up 13% (not all of that is gains for me, unfortunately), and has now topped $10. Nice! What I really like about MEDX - what sold me on the company - is their pipeline. Something like 30 monoclonal antibodies, several in phase II and III trials.

CBST, +7% (but still down a little)

VPHM, +8% (up 22% total!)

MEDX, +13% (up 6.9%)