how to buy qnexa diet pill



kristine harjes: do you want to maybe pick one in particular, a company working in the space, and go a little bit deeper? max macaluso: sure. well, i think a lot oflisteners are familiar with arena pharmaceuticals. it's very active in this field. it has onefda-approved drug for the treatment of obesity that's called belviq. kristine, i don't knowif you've talked about it on the show before? harjes: i would be surprised if we haven't.the obesity drug makers have definitely garnered a lot of interest, particularly in the earlygoings of these drugs. really, really huge promise. obesity is something that a lot ofpeople are struggling with, so, you look at that market, and you say, "oh, man, if somebodycould create a good drug to minimize obesity,

that should be huge." but ... macaluso: exactly, it should be. if you lookat the performance of arena over the last year, shares have dropped around 65%, overthe last 10 years they've dropped around 90%. and a lot of that decline has been drivenby the hype around obesity medications, and, unfortunately, the poor sales that have followedthe launch. so, like you said, a lot of companies were competing for a piece of this market. they all found that demand for the drug forthis indication just was not as robust as they previously thought. now, what's interestingabout arena is, even though sales of belviq have been very slow to ramp up. at the j.p.morgan conference, they mentioned that they're

going to try to deemphasize its obesity drugand instead focus on its pipeline, which is full of drugs that target gpcrs. i think it'sa good move. i think there's a lot of interesting drugs in development there. one targets thes1p1 receptor, gpcr, so that's in that drug class as well. this is a very competitivemarket. there are drugs from celgene and actelion that arena would have to potentially competewith if it gets fda approval. but it's also a big market in the autoimmune space. arena also has a partnership with boehringeringelheim on cns drugs that could lead to more than $240 million in milestone payments.but, you know, look at arena's cash burn. it's around $100 million last year. it doeshave $150 million in cash, so there's not

an immediate cash crunch coming. but, as aninvestor, i would say wait until you see some of the readouts from its phase ii trials.don't focus too much on the phase i trials

how to buy qnexa diet pill,in this pipeline, it's still way too earlyto attribute any value to those. so, you know, i would say, wait for readouts from the phaseii trials before revisiting it. and, at the same time, there are other companies thatwe'll talk about later in the show that have even deeper pipelines than arena.