Ardea Biosciences, Inc. (RDEA)

Creating a portfolio of stocks with large numbers of insider buys.

What a great company for a low price! Ardea's NNRTI HIV drug RDEA806 has shown log 2 reduction in viral load in a phase IIa study and has received regulatory approval for a phase IIb trial. RDEA806 is likely to be superior to other NNRTI's due to fewer side effects, less resistance, and no identified reproductive toxicity. RDEA594 is a very promising drug for gout with phase II data expected in Q1 2009. This compound has already been shown to promote uric acid excretion in healthy subjects and reduce their serum levels. And finally they have a MEK inhibitor currently enrolling a phase I/II trial. And this great pipeline is all available for less than 150M cap! Pile on!
That was the pitch I would have written with my green thumb a year and a half ago, when I was green and green thumbing every baby biotech with an appealing story. Among my outstanding choices were Aeterna Zentaris, Generex Biotechnology, Sonus, Northfield, Epix, ADLS, and a couple of dozen others. Then I learned that most baby biotechs are cheap for a reason. So when I came across Ardea I did a little more in depth research. Yahoo Finance didn't take me back very far, nor did searches on the Street or the Fool. But clearly Ardea had been around a long time, in one form or another. Finally a Google search told me that Ardea used to be called IntraBiotics. IntraBiotics is most memorable for rising on prospects for the antibiotic iseganan. In July 2004, shortly after arranging a dilutive financing on new highs, IntraBiotics imploded with a failed late-stage trial for iseganan in ventilator-associated pneumonia. Lo and behold the company changed their name and reinvented themselves as Ardea. But where did all those great new drugs come from? From Valeant Pharmaceuticals, who apparently would rather give away the cures for HIV and gout than develop them themselves. Who benefited from all these events? Hard to know. Definitely not IntraBiotics stockholders.
So maybe I've become too cynical and I'm going to lose a bunch of CAPS points on a great company because of it. But I think after watching most of my green thumbs sink into oblivion it might be time to change up my strategy a little and look for reasons to hate these companies rather than love them.