On August 30, 2005 I posted a blog on a new, unknown up and coming biotechnology company, Nanoviricides. NNVC was at 8-10 cents when I ran the article and seven months later it hit $3.75.
Here is how that piece began:
In my ongoing quest for short-term trading opportunities, I have come across some services that specialize in “reverse merger” opportunities. A reverse merger stock is a stock that becomes public by buying a “shell” public company which is essentially going or already out of business. It is a quick and dirty way for a start-up to go public.
Not surprisingly, this back-door way around traditional IPO’s attracts some “substance-challenged” companies. But sometimes it attracts a gem that is just in too big a hurry to get their story out and get funding to go the traditional IPO route.
Five and one half years later, I may have uncovered another one of these reverse merger gems. I had been researching this stock all last week. Over the weekend I wrote up the company in my Weekend Update sent to my subscribers. By now, they have had an opportunity to buy, as have I, so here it is on my public persona.
BIOTECHNOLOGY STOCKS
Always a soft-spot in my investors heart, when these go right they have a way of uplifting both our wallets and mankind. This is the moral soul of trading, i.e. when we win, the whole world wins with us. NNVC will one day wipe out viral diseases. CTIX may one day cure as many as half of the cancers known to mankind. While we wait, NEOP is up 30% from its most recent Buy signal.
One of the attractions of NNVC was its, “one size fits all” approach to anti-virals. One basic structure works on all viruses. It’s not that far apart from what we do here with trend trading. One basic algorithm identifies and follows trends, with a tweak here and there to cover special situations.
Cellceutix has taken the same approach to the treatment of cancer. They have developed a drug, Kevetrin, that triggers the p53 gene, the so called, “Guardian Angel” gene. From this linked interview with the company’s CEO:
One of the major breakthroughs that sets Cellceutix apart from other biotech companies is Kevetrin’s ability to activate p53. Can you discuss what this is and why it is so significant?
p53 is known as the “Guardian Angel” gene. It’s the p53 in more than half of the cancers that is not regulating the cell properly. When Kevetrin comes in contact with the p53, it reactivates the p53 and it gets alerted to start doing its job, whether to fix the cell or to kill the cell. This has been one of the “Holy Grails” in cancer research. There have been numerous programs at the biggest pharmas working on this, and it’s hard for us to estimate how much has been spent on these programs, but we’d have to guess it has been in the hundreds of millions of dollars of research. There’s one whole class of drugs with which they attempted to do this, called Nutlins, but those were found to be defective in that they destroyed the DNA, so that wasn’t a viable option. So, it seems that Cellceutix, at this time, and with what we know, has the only activator of p53 as a cancer drug.
So let’s get to some bottom lines here that have me pretty excited about the opportunity represented by this little known biotech:
*$75M market cap, a pittance;
*Products (mainly cancer and autism) amounting to $30B in potential market sales;
BEVERLY, MA–(Marketwire – 05/23/11) – Cellceutix Corporation (OTCQB: CTIX) (Pinksheets:CTIX – News), a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing small molecule drugs to treat unmet medical conditions, announced today that in light of recent exceptional preclinical results regarding Kevetrin™, the Company believes it would be in its shareholders’ best interest to test Kevetrin™ against a very aggressive cancer that would be more beneficial to patients and generate more useful data for its IND filing. Cellceutix has therefore initiated a study in an animal model implanted with human pancreatic cancers.
*Management: Some very prestigious names. Read carefully the resumes of management and of the scientific advisory board, including Dr. Krishna Menon, prominent in the development and progress of NanoViricides;
*Just like NNVC, a truly phenomenal risk/reward profile. 1,000′s of percent to the upside against maybe 50% to the downside, but so what it its even 100% to the downside? A few of these in your portfolio means only half of one needs hit and your gains are enough to fill the coffers.
*Read the above press release again. Something happened in the lab in May, something they can’t completely disclose yet that made them take a 180 and go after pancreatic cancer. WHAT DO THEY KNOW? Well, I’ve seen enough to want to own of piece of whatever it is. Trends or not, this is an opportunity, let’s run with it.
CTIX Daily Trend Model
