Damage control: It's such a fine art form.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals
From the looks of Amylin's stock price action today -- down an additional 25% -- it seems the companies would have been better off keeping their mouths shut.
Today's drop appears to be because the companies announced that there were an additional four deaths of patients taking Byetta. Oops.
Well, actually, these patients had had pancreatitis sometime during the course of having diabetes and the deaths did not appear to be due to pancreatitis. While the FDA knew about these additional deaths -- Amylin had told it -- the agency didn't report them last week, presumably because of that reason. Apparently, investors aren't so sure.
Perhaps the big worry isn't over the four new deaths, but the idea that more cases of pancreatitis could pop up. The companies are looking for additional cases in an effort to show that diabetics on Byetta don't have an inflated rate of pancreatitis above the already higher rate seen in diabetics in general.
But let's face it: There will be more cases of pancreatitis. About 1 million patients have taken the drug already and prescriptions are still growing. Even if the drug doesn't cause pancreatitis, we'll see more cases because the rate in the general population is 3.3 to 4.4 cases per 10,000 adults per year.
Whether or not the drug is causing the pancreatitis, the value of Amylin will basically come down to two things: whether or not the news changes doctors' prescribing habits for the drug and whether or not the cases will affect the FDA's view of its once-weekly version of Byetta.
While there are a lot of treatment options for type 2 diabetics -- like Merck's
Whether the pancreatitis cases will hurt Amylin, Eli Lilly, and their development partner Alkermes'
Given the severe reaction the stock price has seen to what has been reported so far, this may represent a buying opportunity. It may not be easy to jump into a stock when everyone else is panicking, but that's sometimes where the best returns are found.