Focus of Our Research

• Independent Equity Research
• Focus of Our Research
• Leadership
• Brochure
• Founders Letter
• Presentations
• Updating the Definitions of Equity Research
•  

Over the past seven (7) years, Scimitar Equity has consistently provided value-added intelligence and insightful investment analysis on emerging healthcare companies.

Our 2009 research is focused on the following segments in the emerging healthcare technology industry: biotechnology, diagnostics, and devices sectors. We are particularly enthusiastic to identify and follow high impact, emerging technologies that are transitioning into attractive areas of commercialization.

Personalized Medicine

What will happen if the FDA insists that efficacy rates on new drugs need to be at 75% or better? If the era of blockbuster drugs is dwindling, what is the new drug development paradigm going to look like? Can we increase the speed of market approval and reimbursement and decrease the cost of clinical trials by meaningful biomarkers, targeted patient populations and tighter labeling?

Personalized Medicine involves using the advanced tools of molecular genetics and diagnostics to predict how patients will respond to drugs, reducing harmful side effects and increasing benefit. These technologies can produce a personal medical profile that can guide the physician and patient towards selecting the most appropriate drug or treatment regimen and monitor its progress.

Stem Cells and Cell Therapy

Politics is always local, but stem cell advances are being nationalized by a new administration that has money to spend and believes stem cells is worth its investment.

Stem cells can now be grown and transformed into specialized cells with characteristics consistent with cells of various tissues such as muscles or nerves through cell culture. Highly plastic adult stem cells from a variety of sources, including umbilical cord blood and bone marrow, are routinely used in medical therapies. Embryonic cell lines and autologous embryonic stem cells generated through therapeutic cloning have also been proposed as promising candidates for future therapies. Their ability to grow into virtually any of the body's specialized cells is giving drug developers new ways to test drugs in the lab. In many ways, this may be viewed as an extension of personalized medicine, although we believe we are the first to do so.

Molecular Diagnostics and Imaging

Molecular Imaging is a new discipline that unites molecular biology and in vivo imaging; enabling the visualization of the cellular function and the follow-up of the molecular process in living organisms without perturbing them.

The multiple and numerous potentialities of this field are applicable to the diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, and neurological and cardiovascular diseases. This technique also contributes to improving the treatment of these disorders by optimizing the pre-clinical and clinical tests of new medication. Molecular Diagnostics already has great traction and is a critical component of the emergence of personalized medicine. Its utility in infectious disease is merely an entry point.

Monoclonal Antibodies

Have already become an important tool in biochemistry, molecular biology, drug discovery and medicine. The idea of a magic bullet was first postulated that if a compound could be made that selectively targeted a disease-causing organism, then a toxin for that organism could be delivered along with the agent of selectivity.

It is now possible to create monoclonal antibodies that specifically bind to that substance; they can then serve to detect or purify that substance. The second generation of MAB technology will be evolutionary but productive and profitable for those with the wherewithal and IP to take advantage of it.

Gene Therapy

Are we finally going to do what has been promised for a couple of decades? Who will develop the delivery systems and make them safe? What diseases will be first? Or will a lot of fanfare and success over regulatory hurdles end in more disappointment? The opportunity is too large to ignore and too far off to make huge bets, but we want to stay on top of who is doing what and the baby-steps successes and failures along the way. Drugs work by binding with proteins that are the underlying cause of a specific disease. But a number of therapies in development seek to work by acting directly on genes that are responsible for producing the deleterious protein in the first place. There are several technologies for accomplishing this, whether it is the introduction of a gene through a viral vector, RNAi, antisense or the use of so-called zinc finger proteins.

These approaches hold the promise of curing not only hereditary diseases, but cancer and infectious diseases that exploit genetic flaws as well. A set of short strands of RNA known as microRNAs have emerged as a – new - means of diagnosing and treating disease. MicroRNAs work by preventing the translation of messenger RNA into proteins or by initiating the breakdown of messenger RNA. The absence or presence of specific microRNAs in various cells has been shown to be associated with specific human diseases including cancer, viral infection, metabolic disorders, and inflammatory disease. What makes these small strands of RNA particularly compelling to drug companies is that they have the ability to not only up-regulate or down-regulate a single gene, but networks of genes as well. This makes them well suited for being enlisted in the fight against diseases such as cancer and inflammatory disease where multiple genes in a network are at play and also serve as important diagnostic tools.