Geron is a Train Wreck

Shares fell 20% when it gave up on development of treatments using stem cells last year and an additional 56% earlier this year when its lead cancer drug, imetelstat, failed a phase 2 trial in breast cancer. And now it's down 25% today after disclosing that its (now lead) drug GRN1005 failed to show an effect on brain metastases in patients with breast cancer. What's left? Imetelstat. While it was hit by an oncoming train, it appears the drug wasn't completely knocked off the track. Geron blamed the lack of success in breast cancer patients on overlapping toxicities of imetelstat and a chemotherapy it was combined with, which led doctors to decrease the chemotherapy dose. The biotech also stopped a lung cancer trial where imetelstat was used as a single agent because it appeared that any effect Geron might see wouldn't be statistically significant. As it had planned to do after the trial ended, Geron looked at patients with tumors that had short telomeres -- the protective ends of chromosomes -- and found patients in that subgroup taking imetelstat progressed slower than those on placebo. The data are only from 19 patients, but the finding makes sense scientifically. Imetelstat is designed to inhibit the enzyme responsible for lengthening telomeres. Giving the drug a head start by starting with short telomeres would make it easier for the drug to kill the tumor cell. Geron also has data from a phase 2 trial in patients with essential thrombocythemia, a blood cancer, where 100% of the patients had a response with 13 out of the 14 patients achieving a complete response. These are patients that failed or couldn't take other therapies, so any response is pretty impressive. .............................................................................................................................................................................. That was from Motley Fool's website.................................................... Geron hit a new low of .91 and closed at $1.14 on 6+ million shares. The three month avg. is 1.5 million shares........................................................... ........................................................................................My Wife was so upset, she sold all her Geron shares at market, for 94 cents a shares. Told me when the money clears, close the IRA account, take all the money out. If I don't stop losing money by 2014, I'm going to do the same thing. The average investor doesn't stand a chance. It's a rigged casino. I can make more money buying junk and reselling it, which I enjoy doing.